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Every one of the great playwrights push the boundaries of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their own way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure subjects – from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the enigma of the mind – and convert them into witty, imaginative and frequently emotional theatrical works. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a powerful glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Early Encounter

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly due to Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to give a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a at that time obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer racked up an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of 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 understood the nature of our world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances causing our end. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the silence, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic blend of daring ideas and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a major moral issue: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an absolute, God-given law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the focus of a speech being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the London Library where he was gripping a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became more and more apparent. The turning point arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It asks a whole host of queries such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of individual madness and whether ideas such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense realization of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and volition, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, functions because it is deeply moving. Concepts and emotion perfectly coincide in a moment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past civilisations to which her tutor answers: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her sadly cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was seldom questioned. What was contested, especially in the beginning, were his reservations about the effectiveness of drama: something he frequently discussed 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 refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a continuous critique on money, matrimony, values, class, the decline of the nobility and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a number of works that deal to great effect with the misuse of civil liberties by oppressive governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident incorrectly declared crazy and confined in a chamber with an real lunatic who believes himself in control of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the entire orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the cruel absurdities of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and strictness with a