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Every one of the great playwrights broaden the boundaries of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their own way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized themes – from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the mystery of the mind – and convert them into humorous, imaginative and often touching theatrical works. Theatre, the actor Olivier remarked, is a significant glamoriser of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Early Encounter

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard early on. That was completely due to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to present a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a at that time obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer accumulated an constantly rising taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was perfectly gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the workings of our world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by character and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the quiet, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The typical combination of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a significant moral issue: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether principles obeyed an absolute, God-given law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the focus of a speech being developed by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was gripping a pile of books that reached up 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 evident. The turning point perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to revival. It poses a whole host of queries such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of private derangement and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist beyond our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened awareness of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and choice, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is profoundly touching. Concepts and sentiment flawlessly coincide in a scene where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past civilisations to which her tutor responds: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the classical physics endures beyond her sadly truncated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was infrequently questioned. What was contested, notably in the initial period, were his reservations about the power of theatre: something he often discussed in discussions. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a ongoing observation on finance, marriage, values, status, the weakening of the nobility and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a number of works that deal to significant impact with the misuse of individual freedoms by oppressive regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist falsely pronounced mad and confined in a cell with an genuine lunatic who thinks he is in control of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the full orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the brutal ridiculousness of communist repression with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with wit and inflexibility with a