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All the finest playwrights push the boundaries of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their own way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized subjects – from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the enigma of consciousness – and turn them into humorous, imaginative and regularly moving plays. The stage, the actor Olivier once said, is a powerful glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Early Discovery

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly due to Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to present a brief lecture on two radio plays by a back then little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer accumulated an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was impeccably courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the ways of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances leading to our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the silence, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic blend of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a big ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles adhered to an unchanging, God-given law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the subject of a talk being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a fractured marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Breakthrough

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

With time, the feeling of his plays became more and more evident. The key moment likely came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It poses a whole host of issues such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of personal instability and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened consciousness of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, functions because it is deeply touching. Concepts and sentiment flawlessly merge in a moment where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past cultures to which her teacher replies: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the Newtonian universe outlasts her tragically truncated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was seldom doubted. What was discussed, especially in the initial period, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of drama: something he often discussed in interviews. “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 Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a ongoing observation on money, matrimony, ethics, social class, the fall of the aristocracy and the rise of business. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a number of works that grapple to significant impact with the abuse of individual freedoms by oppressive systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly pronounced insane and locked in a room with an genuine psychiatric patient who thinks he is in charge of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the brutal ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a