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Every one of the finest playwrights extend the boundaries of theatre. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their own fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized subjects – from chaos theory to ethical thought and the puzzle of consciousness – and transform them into witty, creative and regularly touching theatrical works. Drama, the actor Olivier once said, is a powerful glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Initial Discovery

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly because of Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to give a brief lecture on two radio plays by a back then little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer ran up an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained exceptionally polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the workings of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the silence, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive fusion of conceptual boldness and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a major moral issue: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the focus of a talk being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the London Library where he was holding a pile of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became ever more apparent. The key moment arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to reproduction. It poses a multitude of questions such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of individual madness and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense consciousness of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and choice, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is intensely moving. Thoughts and feeling perfectly come together in a segment where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, laments the demise of past cultures to which her tutor answers: “Scientific insights caught sight of and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her unfortunately truncated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was infrequently questioned. What was discussed, particularly in the early years, were his doubts about the power of theatre: something he often discussed in discussions. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a continuous critique on wealth, marriage, values, class, the weakening of the upper class and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a series of works that engage to powerful results with the violation of human rights by oppressive systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly pronounced crazy and imprisoned in a room with an genuine psychiatric patient who thinks he is in charge of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the whole orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard exposing the harsh illogicalities of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a