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All the great playwrights extend the boundaries of theatre. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their unique manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure themes – ranging from chaos theory to ethical thought and the puzzle of consciousness – and convert them into clever, inventive and regularly touching plays. Drama, Laurence Olivier once said, is a great embellisher of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Discovery

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard early on. That was entirely due to Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a short talk on two audio dramas by a then obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer racked up an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was perfectly polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the ways of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances leading to our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The distinctive fusion of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a major ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether principles adhered to an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the focus of a lecture being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Breakthrough

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

With the years, the feeling of his plays became ever more apparent. The key moment arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to revival. It raises a whole host of queries such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of personal instability and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, works because it is profoundly moving. Ideas and sentiment seamlessly coincide in a scene where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past civilisations to which her instructor responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the Newton's world endures beyond her unfortunately cut short life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was seldom challenged. What was contested, particularly in the initial period, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of theatre: something he frequently explored in conversations. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a running commentary on money, wedlock, morals, class, the fall of the upper class and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a series of works that grapple to significant impact with the abuse of civil liberties by dictatorial governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly diagnosed mad and locked in a room with an authentic psychiatric patient who imagines himself in command of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the full orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the brutal illogicalities of communist repression with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with wit and inflexibility with a