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Every one of the finest dramatists push the boundaries of theatre. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their distinct fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure subjects – ranging from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the enigma of the mind – and turn them into witty, creative and frequently moving dramas. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a significant embellisher of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Discovery

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely because of a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to present a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a back then little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer accumulated an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained impeccably polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the workings of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by individuals 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 undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances resulting in our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the silence, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive blend of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a big ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules followed an absolute, God-given law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the subject of a lecture being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the London Library where he was clutching a pile of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With time, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly evident. The turning point arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It asks a multitude of questions such as whether any social obligation is the result of personal instability and whether notions such as justice and patriotism exist independent of our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute awareness of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and volition, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly touching. Thoughts and feeling flawlessly merge in a moment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, laments the demise of past cultures to which her tutor responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the classical physics survives her unfortunately cut short life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was seldom questioned. What was discussed, notably in the initial period, were his doubts about the effectiveness of art: something he regularly talked about in discussions. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a continuous critique on money, wedlock, ethics, class, the decline of the nobility and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a series of works that deal to powerful results with the misuse of human rights by dictatorial regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly declared mad and locked in a cell with an authentic psychiatric patient who thinks he is in command of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the brutal ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with wit and strictness with a