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Every one of the outstanding playwrights broaden the boundaries of theatre. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their unique way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric themes – from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the puzzle of awareness – and transform them into witty, creative and regularly moving theatrical works. Theatre, Laurence Olivier once said, is a significant glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Initial Discovery

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly due to Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a then unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer ran up an constantly rising taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained impeccably polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the workings of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our end. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The typical blend of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a big ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your typical theatrical topic, 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 understood that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was clutching a stack 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 more and more visible. The turning point perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to reproduction. It raises a multitude of issues such as whether any public commitment is the result of private derangement and whether concepts such as fairness and patriotism exist beyond our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and free will, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, works because it is profoundly touching. Concepts and sentiment perfectly coincide in a moment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past civilizations to which her instructor responds: “Scientific insights glimpsed and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the Newtonian universe survives her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was seldom doubted. What was debated, notably in the initial period, were his reservations about the effectiveness of theatre: something he frequently discussed in discussions. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a continuous critique on wealth, matrimony, morals, class, the decline of the nobility and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a series of works that grapple to powerful results with the violation of individual freedoms by oppressive regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic falsely declared crazy and imprisoned in a room with an real lunatic who imagines himself in command of an symphony. It was startling both to see the full LSO on stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the harsh absurdities of communist repression with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a