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All the finest playwrights broaden the boundaries of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their own manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric themes – ranging from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the mystery of awareness – and convert them into humorous, inventive and regularly moving theatrical works. Drama, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a significant glamoriser of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Initial Discovery

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard early on. That was entirely because of Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he invited me to give a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a then obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer ran up an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained exceptionally gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the ways of our world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances leading to our demise. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive combination of conceptual boldness and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a big philosophical question: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions followed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the focus of a lecture being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the entrance of the London Library where he was gripping 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 turning point arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It raises a plethora of issues such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of individual madness and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist beyond our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened realization of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and volition, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, works because it is profoundly touching. Thoughts and sentiment seamlessly merge in a segment where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past civilisations to which her tutor replies: “Scientific insights glimpsed and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe survives her sadly abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was seldom doubted. What was debated, especially in the initial period, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of theatre: something he often discussed in conversations. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a running commentary on wealth, matrimony, values, social class, the fall of the upper class and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a series of works that deal to significant impact with the misuse of human rights by dictatorial governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist falsely declared mad and confined in a cell with an authentic lunatic who believes himself in command of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the full orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the harsh illogicalities of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with irony and inflexibility with a