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All the outstanding playwrights extend the boundaries of theatre. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their distinct fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure subjects – from chaos theory to ethical thought and the puzzle of awareness – and transform them into witty, creative and regularly emotional plays. The stage, Laurence Olivier noted, is a powerful glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Early Encounter

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard early on. That was entirely due to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to give a mini-speech on two radio plays by a back then obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer racked up an constantly rising cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was exceptionally polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the nature of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances resulting in our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the stillness, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The characteristic combination of daring ideas and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a major philosophical question: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles followed an universal, God-given law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the focus of a speech being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the London Library where he was gripping a stack of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With time, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly evident. The key moment arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It raises a whole host of issues such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of individual madness and whether ideas such as justice and national pride exist outside our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened realization of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and free will, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, functions because it is deeply moving. Concepts and sentiment seamlessly merge in a scene where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past cultures to which her instructor replies: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newtonian universe outlasts her unfortunately truncated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was seldom doubted. What was debated, notably in the initial period, were his reservations about the effectiveness of drama: something he frequently explored in conversations. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a continuous critique on money, matrimony, ethics, status, the fall of the aristocracy and the rise of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a series of works that deal to significant impact with the abuse of civil liberties by dictatorial governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic falsely diagnosed insane and confined in a room with an real madman who thinks he is in charge of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the full orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the cruel ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with wit and strictness with a