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All the outstanding playwrights broaden the boundaries of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their distinct way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized themes – ranging from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the puzzle of the mind – and transform them into humorous, imaginative and often emotional dramas. Theatre, the actor Olivier once said, is a powerful embellisher of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Initial Encounter

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely due to Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a back then unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer ran up an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed exceptionally gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the ways of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances causing our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the silence, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The typical combination of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a major ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules followed an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the focus of a lecture being developed by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs of the London Library where he was holding a mound of books that reached 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 key moment arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to revival. It raises a multitude of issues such as whether any social obligation is the result of personal instability and whether concepts such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened consciousness of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is deeply moving. Thoughts and feeling perfectly coincide in a scene where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past civilisations to which her teacher responds: “Scientific insights caught sight of and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the classical physics survives her tragically abbreviated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was seldom doubted. What was contested, particularly in the beginning, were his reservations about the effectiveness of art: something he often explored in conversations. “I used to feel alone,” 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 compunction about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a continuous critique on wealth, matrimony, morals, status, the weakening of the upper class and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a number of works that grapple to powerful results with the abuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly declared crazy and imprisoned in a chamber with an authentic psychiatric patient who believes himself in control of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the full LSO on the stage and to see Stoppard exposing the cruel absurdities of communist repression with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with irony and inflexibility with a