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Every one of the finest dramatists push the boundaries of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their distinct manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure subjects – from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the enigma of the mind – and transform them into witty, creative and often emotional dramas. Theatre, the actor Olivier once said, is a great glamoriser of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Early Discovery

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard early on. That was entirely due to Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a back then obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer racked up an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained impeccably courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the nature of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal 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 definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the quiet, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The typical fusion of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a big philosophical question: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules followed an universal, God-given law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the focus of a talk being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the a library in London where he was clutching a stack of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became more and more evident. The turning point arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to revival. It poses a plethora of queries such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of personal instability and whether notions such as justice and national pride exist independent of our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense realization of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and free will, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is intensely moving. Concepts and emotion flawlessly merge in a scene where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past civilizations to which her teacher replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the classical physics survives her tragically abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was rarely questioned. What was discussed, particularly in the beginning, were his doubts about the efficacy of theatre: something he often talked about in discussions. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a ongoing observation on finance, matrimony, morals, status, the fall of the upper class and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a collection of works that engage to significant impact with the violation of human rights by oppressive regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly declared insane and locked in a chamber with an genuine madman who thinks he is in charge of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the harsh absurdities of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with wit and inflexibility with a