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All the finest playwrights push the boundaries of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their own manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure themes – ranging from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the enigma of consciousness – and transform them into humorous, inventive and often moving plays. Drama, the actor Olivier remarked, is a great embellisher of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Initial Encounter

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard early on. That was completely due to Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a back then unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer accumulated an constantly rising taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed perfectly courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the ways of our world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances causing our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the quiet, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The typical blend of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a big philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the subject of a talk being developed by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the a library in London where he was gripping a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the feeling of his plays became increasingly apparent. The breakthrough perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It asks a whole host of questions such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of private derangement and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute consciousness of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and volition, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly touching. Concepts and sentiment perfectly come together in a segment where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past cultures to which her tutor answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the classical physics endures beyond her sadly cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was rarely doubted. What was contested, especially in the early years, were his skepticism about the efficacy of theatre: something he frequently explored in conversations. “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 housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a running commentary on finance, matrimony, ethics, class, the decline of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a collection of works that engage to powerful results with the violation 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 Soviet critic incorrectly declared mad and confined in a chamber with an real psychiatric patient who believes himself in charge of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard revealing the cruel ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and strictness with a