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All the finest playwrights broaden the boundaries of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their unique manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric themes – from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the enigma of the mind – and turn them into humorous, imaginative and often touching theatrical works. Drama, the actor Olivier noted, is a powerful glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Discovery

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely because of a man named Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to give a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a back then obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer accumulated an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed perfectly gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the nature of our world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by character and plot. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances leading to our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the silence, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The characteristic blend of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a significant moral issue: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether principles obeyed an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the topic of a lecture being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the steps 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 ever more evident. The breakthrough likely came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to revival. It poses a whole host of issues such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of private derangement and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist beyond our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute realization of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and free will, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is deeply touching. Thoughts and emotion perfectly merge in a scene where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past cultures to which her instructor replies: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the classical physics outlasts her sadly abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was seldom doubted. What was debated, notably in the initial period, were his doubts about the power of theatre: something he often explored in interviews. “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 Vietnam 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 totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a continuous critique on wealth, marriage, ethics, status, the fall of the nobility and the dominance of business. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a series of works that engage to great effect with the abuse of individual freedoms by oppressive regimes. 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 wrongly diagnosed mad and locked in a room with an real lunatic who believes himself in charge of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the full orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the cruel ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with wit and strictness with a