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All the finest playwrights broaden the boundaries of theatre. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their distinct way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure topics – ranging from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the mystery of awareness – and convert them into clever, inventive and frequently touching theatrical works. The stage, the actor Olivier remarked, is a powerful glamorizer of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Initial Discovery

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely because of Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to present a short talk on two broadcast plays by a at that time little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer ran up an constantly rising cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained perfectly courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the ways of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by character and plot. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances causing our end. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The characteristic blend of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a significant philosophical question: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the subject of a speech being developed 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 broken marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the a library in London where he was clutching a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With time, the feeling of his plays became increasingly visible. The key moment arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to reproduction. It asks a whole host of questions such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of private derangement and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense consciousness of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is deeply emotional. Concepts and emotion seamlessly merge in a scene where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past civilisations to which her teacher answers: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the classical physics endures beyond her tragically cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was infrequently challenged. What was discussed, particularly in the early years, were his skepticism about the efficacy of drama: something he frequently explored in discussions. “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 hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a ongoing observation on finance, matrimony, ethics, social class, the decline of the upper class and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a number of works that engage to significant impact with the misuse 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 depicted a Russian dissident incorrectly pronounced mad and confined in a room with an real lunatic who believes himself in charge of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the harsh absurdities of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and strictness with a