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Every one of the great playwrights broaden the boundaries of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their distinct way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric themes – from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the puzzle of awareness – and convert them into clever, creative and often moving plays. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a powerful glamoriser of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Initial Discovery

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard early on. That was entirely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to give a brief lecture on two radio plays by a then obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer ran up an skyrocketing cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the cleverness 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 appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was perfectly gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the workings of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances causing our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the stillness, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic combination of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a significant philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the subject of a lecture being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the a library in London where he was holding a mound of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became increasingly evident. The key moment perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to revival. It poses a whole host of queries such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of personal instability and whether concepts such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened awareness of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, works because it is intensely touching. Thoughts and sentiment perfectly coincide in a moment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past cultures to which her instructor answers: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the Newton's world survives her tragically cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was rarely doubted. What was contested, especially in the early years, were his doubts about the efficacy of drama: something he regularly talked about 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 the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no qualms 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 entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a running commentary on money, marriage, values, status, the decline of the upper class and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a number of works that grapple to powerful results with the abuse of human rights by oppressive systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident incorrectly declared insane and imprisoned in a cell with an real lunatic who thinks he is in command of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the cruel absurdities of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with irony and strictness with a