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Every one of the great dramatists extend the boundaries of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their unique fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure topics – from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the puzzle of awareness – and convert them into clever, creative and regularly emotional dramas. Theatre, the actor Olivier once said, is a powerful glamorizer of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Initial Discovery

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard early on. That was wholly because of a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to give a short talk on two radio plays by a back then obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer ran up an ever escalating taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit 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 polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the workings of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances leading to our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the silence, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The characteristic blend of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a major ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the subject of a talk being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting 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 passage of time, the feeling of his plays became increasingly evident. The key moment likely came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It raises a plethora of questions such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of private derangement and whether ideas such as justice and national pride exist independent of our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened consciousness of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, works because it is intensely moving. Ideas and feeling flawlessly coincide in a scene where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past civilizations to which her tutor responds: “Scientific insights glimpsed and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the Newtonian universe survives her unfortunately cut short life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was rarely questioned. What was discussed, particularly in the initial period, were his doubts about the power of drama: something he frequently explored in conversations. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a running commentary on finance, marriage, morals, class, the weakening of the upper class and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a collection of works that engage to significant impact with the misuse of civil liberties by dictatorial governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident falsely pronounced mad and locked in a chamber with an authentic lunatic who imagines himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard revealing the harsh illogicalities of communist repression with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with irony and strictness with a