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Every one of the outstanding playwrights push the boundaries of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their distinct manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric themes – ranging from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of the mind – and turn them into clever, creative and often touching dramas. Drama, the actor Olivier noted, is a significant glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Initial Encounter

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard early on. That was completely due to Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to give a short talk on two audio dramas by a at that time 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 impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed impeccably courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the workings of our world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances causing our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the stillness, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive combination of conceptual boldness and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a major moral issue: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions followed an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the topic of a speech being prepared 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 failing marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was holding a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With time, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly visible. The key moment arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to revival. It raises a whole host of questions such as whether any civic duty is the result of personal instability and whether ideas such as justice and patriotism exist beyond our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense consciousness of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and choice, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is deeply emotional. Thoughts and emotion flawlessly merge in a moment where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past civilisations to which her instructor replies: “Scientific insights glimpsed and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the Newton's world survives her sadly abbreviated life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was rarely questioned. What was discussed, especially in the beginning, were his skepticism about the power of theatre: something he frequently talked about in discussions. “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 hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a ongoing observation on wealth, matrimony, values, status, the decline of the upper class and the rise of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a collection of works that deal to great effect with the violation of human rights by authoritarian 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 wrongly pronounced crazy and confined in a cell with an genuine psychiatric patient who thinks he is in command of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the brutal absurdities of communist repression with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a