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All the outstanding dramatists extend the boundaries of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their own way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric themes – ranging from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the mystery of awareness – and transform them into witty, inventive and often touching plays. Theatre, the actor Olivier remarked, is a significant glamoriser of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Initial Encounter

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he invited me to present a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a then little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer ran up an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained perfectly polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the ways of our world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances causing our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the quiet, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The distinctive blend of daring ideas and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a significant philosophical question: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an absolute, God-given law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the topic of a lecture being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Affecting Breakthrough

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

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became more and more evident. The key moment arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to revival. It asks a multitude of issues such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of individual madness and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and free will, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is profoundly emotional. Thoughts and sentiment flawlessly coincide in a scene where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past civilisations to which her instructor responds: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the Newton's world survives her sadly truncated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was rarely questioned. What was debated, especially in the beginning, were his doubts about the effectiveness of theatre: something he frequently discussed in conversations. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a running commentary on wealth, marriage, morals, social class, the weakening of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a number of works that grapple to significant impact with the misuse of individual freedoms by oppressive regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly declared insane and confined in a chamber with an genuine psychiatric patient who thinks he is in charge of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the entire LSO on stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the harsh ridiculousness of communist repression with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with irony and rigidity with a