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Every one of the finest dramatists push the boundaries of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their distinct manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure themes – ranging from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of awareness – and turn them into humorous, imaginative and frequently emotional plays. Theatre, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a significant glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Discovery

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard early on. That was completely because of a man named Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to give a short talk on two radio plays by a then unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer accumulated an skyrocketing cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace 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 now love – he was impeccably polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the ways of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances causing our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The typical combination of daring ideas 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 learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the focus of a lecture 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 failing marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about complex 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 gripping a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became ever more apparent. The breakthrough arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to revival. It poses a whole host of queries such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of private derangement and whether ideas such as fairness and national pride exist outside our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense awareness of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and free will, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, works because it is profoundly moving. Concepts and emotion seamlessly merge in a segment where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past civilizations to which her tutor responds: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the Newton's world survives her sadly cut short life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was seldom questioned. What was debated, especially in the initial period, were his doubts about the power of drama: something he frequently talked about in interviews. “I used to feel alone,” 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 allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a ongoing observation on finance, matrimony, ethics, class, the fall of the upper class and the rise of business. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a series of works that grapple to significant impact with the violation of individual freedoms by oppressive systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident falsely diagnosed mad and locked in a chamber with an genuine psychiatric patient who believes himself in control of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the entire LSO on stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the brutal absurdities of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “force is met with wit and rigidity with a