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All the great playwrights extend the boundaries of theatre. Beckett and Pinter did it in their unique fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure themes – from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the mystery of the mind – and turn them into humorous, imaginative and regularly emotional dramas. The stage, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a great embellisher of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Early Discovery

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely due to Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to give a short talk on two audio dramas by a at that time unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer ran up an ever escalating cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed exceptionally courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the nature of our world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we eventually 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 intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances leading to our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the stillness, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The characteristic fusion of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a big philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules followed an absolute, God-given law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the focus of a speech being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the London Library where he was holding a pile of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became ever more evident. The turning point likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to restaging. It asks a multitude of issues such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of individual madness and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened realization of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and volition, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, functions because it is profoundly emotional. Ideas and emotion flawlessly come together in a scene where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, laments the loss of past civilisations to which her tutor replies: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the Newton's world outlasts her tragically abbreviated life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was rarely questioned. What was debated, especially in the early years, were his skepticism about the efficacy of theatre: something he regularly discussed 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 qualms about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a running commentary on money, wedlock, morals, status, 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 powerful results with the misuse of civil liberties by dictatorial governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic falsely pronounced mad and confined in a cell with an real psychiatric patient who imagines himself in command of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the cruel absurdities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a