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Every one of the great playwrights broaden the boundaries of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their own manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure themes – ranging from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the puzzle of consciousness – and turn them into clever, inventive and regularly moving plays. Theatre, the actor Olivier noted, is a great glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Encounter

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely thanks to Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a short talk on two audio dramas by a then obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer ran up an skyrocketing 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 captivated by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was impeccably polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the ways of the media.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances causing our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the quiet, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive fusion of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a major philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the focus of a talk being developed by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the London Library where he was gripping a mound of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly apparent. The breakthrough arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to restaging. It poses a multitude of queries such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of individual madness and whether concepts such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense awareness of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and choice, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, works because it is deeply moving. Ideas and sentiment perfectly coincide in a scene where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past civilisations to which her instructor responds: “Scientific insights seen briefly and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the Newtonian universe outlasts her tragically truncated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was seldom questioned. What was contested, especially in the early years, were his doubts about the effectiveness of art: something he regularly discussed in conversations. “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 housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a ongoing observation on finance, matrimony, ethics, status, the weakening of the upper class and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a series of works that deal to powerful results with the violation of human rights by authoritarian systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly declared mad and locked in a cell with an real psychiatric patient who imagines himself in control of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the brutal illogicalities of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with wit and inflexibility with a