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All the great dramatists push the boundaries of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their unique manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure themes – ranging from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the mystery of the mind – and transform them into witty, creative and often moving plays. The stage, the actor Olivier once said, is a great glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Initial Discovery

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was completely due to Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a mini-speech on two radio plays by a at that time obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer racked up an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained perfectly courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the ways of our world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we finally 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 ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The typical fusion of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a significant moral issue: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles obeyed an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the focus of a talk being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Revelation

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

With time, the emotional content of his plays became ever more apparent. The key moment likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to revival. It poses a multitude of queries such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of personal instability and whether concepts such as justice and patriotism exist beyond our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened awareness of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is intensely touching. Thoughts and feeling seamlessly come together in a scene where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, laments the demise of past civilisations to which her tutor answers: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the classical physics endures beyond her tragically abbreviated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was infrequently challenged. What was discussed, notably in the initial period, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of drama: something he regularly discussed in discussions. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a continuous critique on money, marriage, ethics, class, the decline of the upper class and the dominance of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a number of works that engage to great effect with the abuse of human rights by authoritarian systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic wrongly declared insane and confined in a room with an real madman who thinks he is in command of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the whole orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the harsh absurdities of communist repression with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “force is met with wit and strictness with a