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All the finest playwrights push the boundaries of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their own way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure topics – ranging from chaos theory to ethical thought and the mystery of consciousness – and turn them into witty, creative and frequently touching theatrical works. Theatre, Laurence Olivier noted, is a significant glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Initial Encounter

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard early on. That was wholly thanks to Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a brief lecture on two radio plays by a back then little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer ran up an ever escalating taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the voice of the time. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was exceptionally gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the workings of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the stillness, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The typical blend of intellectual audacity and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a significant ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the focus of a lecture being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was clutching a mound of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly visible. The turning point perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to restaging. It raises a multitude of queries such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of personal instability and whether notions such as justice and national pride exist outside our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute realization of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and choice, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is profoundly emotional. Concepts and emotion perfectly merge in a moment where a gifted youth, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past civilisations to which her tutor answers: “Scientific insights glimpsed and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the Newtonian universe survives her unfortunately truncated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was seldom challenged. What was debated, particularly in the beginning, were his doubts about the efficacy of art: something he regularly talked about in discussions. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a continuous critique on money, wedlock, values, status, the weakening of the upper class and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a collection of works that engage to powerful results with the misuse of individual freedoms by oppressive regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident falsely pronounced mad and imprisoned in a room with an authentic psychiatric patient who thinks he is in command of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the brutal ridiculousness of communist repression with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a