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Every one of the great playwrights broaden the limits of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their unique way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure topics – ranging from chaos theory to ethical thought and the enigma of consciousness – and turn them into humorous, inventive and frequently emotional plays. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a significant glamoriser of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Discovery

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was completely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to give a short talk on two radio plays by a then unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer accumulated an constantly rising taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

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

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances leading to our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the silence, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive combination of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a big ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules followed an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the subject of a lecture being written 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 anguish of a failing marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the London Library where he was clutching a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly apparent. The turning point arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to revival. It raises a plethora of questions such as whether any public commitment is the result of individual madness and whether concepts such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense 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 host of other things, functions because it is deeply touching. Concepts and emotion perfectly merge in a moment where a gifted youth, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past cultures to which her instructor answers: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the Newton's world outlasts her sadly truncated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was rarely doubted. What was debated, particularly in the beginning, were his skepticism about the power of theatre: something he often explored 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 Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a ongoing observation on money, wedlock, morals, social class, the weakening of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a number of works that deal to significant impact with the misuse of individual freedoms by oppressive systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly diagnosed crazy and imprisoned in a chamber with an genuine madman who imagines himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the whole orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the harsh ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with irony and strictness with a