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Every one of the great playwrights extend the boundaries of drama. Beckett and Pinter did it in their own manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure themes – from chaos theory to ethical thought and the enigma of consciousness – and turn them into witty, imaginative and often moving theatrical works. The stage, Laurence Olivier once said, is a great glamoriser of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Encounter

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely due to Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to give a short talk on two broadcast plays by a then little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer ran up an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was exceptionally gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the ways of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances causing our demise. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the silence, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic combination of intellectual audacity and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a major philosophical question: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether principles followed an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the subject of a speech being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was clutching a mound of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became ever more apparent. The turning point likely came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It raises a whole host of questions such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of personal instability and whether concepts such as justice and patriotism exist independent of our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute awareness of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly moving. Concepts and emotion seamlessly come together in a scene where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past cultures to which her tutor responds: “Scientific insights seen briefly and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the Newton's world endures beyond her tragically truncated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was seldom challenged. What was debated, particularly in the early years, were his reservations about the efficacy of drama: something he often discussed in interviews. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a ongoing observation on finance, marriage, ethics, status, the decline of the nobility and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a collection of works that engage to powerful results with the misuse of individual freedoms by authoritarian systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic incorrectly declared insane and imprisoned in a room with an authentic madman who thinks he is in control of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the brutal absurdities of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with irony and strictness with a