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Every one of the outstanding playwrights push the boundaries of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their distinct way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure subjects – ranging from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the puzzle of consciousness – and turn them into clever, imaginative and often moving theatrical works. Theatre, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a great embellisher of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Encounter

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely due to Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he asked me to present a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a back then little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer racked up an ever escalating taxi bill. 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 ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was exceptionally gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the workings of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our end. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The typical blend of daring ideas and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a major moral issue: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether principles adhered to an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the subject of a talk being prepared 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 broken marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about sophisticated 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 holding a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became increasingly apparent. The key moment perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to revival. It asks a plethora of issues such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of individual madness and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute realization of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is intensely emotional. Concepts and emotion perfectly merge in a scene where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past civilisations to which her instructor replies: “Scientific insights caught sight of and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newtonian universe survives her tragically cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was rarely questioned. What was discussed, especially in the beginning, were his reservations about the power of theatre: something he regularly talked about in interviews. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a running commentary on money, marriage, ethics, class, the fall of the upper class and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a series of works that deal to significant impact with the abuse of human rights by oppressive systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident falsely diagnosed crazy and imprisoned in a chamber with an real madman who believes himself in command of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the entire orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the harsh absurdities of communist repression with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with wit and rigidity with a