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Every one of the great playwrights extend the boundaries of theatre. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their distinct way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure themes – ranging from chaos theory to ethical thought and the mystery of the mind – and convert them into witty, inventive and regularly touching dramas. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a great glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Initial Discovery

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard early on. That was completely because of Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he asked me to present a short talk on two audio dramas by a then obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer racked up an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was perfectly polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the ways of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the silence, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The typical combination of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a significant moral issue: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the subject of a lecture being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was holding 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 sentiment of his plays became more and more apparent. The breakthrough arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It poses a plethora of queries such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of private derangement and whether concepts such as justice and patriotism exist outside our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense awareness of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is intensely touching. Concepts and feeling seamlessly merge in a segment where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past cultures to which her teacher responds: “Scientific insights glimpsed and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newton's world endures beyond her tragically cut short life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was rarely challenged. What was discussed, notably in the initial period, were his doubts about the efficacy of art: something he often explored in interviews. “I used to feel alone,” 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 avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a running commentary on wealth, wedlock, ethics, class, the fall of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a collection of works that grapple to significant impact with the abuse of civil liberties by dictatorial systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic incorrectly pronounced mad and confined in a chamber with an genuine lunatic who imagines himself in command of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the brutal illogicalities of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “force is met with irony and rigidity with a