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Every one of the finest playwrights broaden the frontiers of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their own manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric themes – ranging from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the enigma of awareness – and turn them into humorous, inventive and often touching theatrical works. Theatre, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a great glamoriser of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Early Encounter

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly because of a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to give a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a back then little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer ran up an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained perfectly gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the nature of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by character and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances leading to our end. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the silence, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The typical combination of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a major moral issue: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the subject of a lecture being written 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 suffering of a failing marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the London Library where he was holding a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became more and more evident. The key moment perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to restaging. It poses a multitude of issues such as whether any public commitment is the outcome 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 heightened consciousness of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and volition, classicism and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is deeply touching. Thoughts and emotion flawlessly coincide in a scene where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past civilisations to which her instructor responds: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the Newton's world outlasts her unfortunately cut short life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was rarely questioned. What was discussed, notably in the initial period, were his doubts about the efficacy of theatre: something he frequently explored in interviews. “I used to feel alone,” 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 hesitation 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 entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a running commentary on finance, wedlock, morals, status, the decline of the aristocracy and the rise of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a collection of works that grapple to significant impact with the abuse of individual freedoms by oppressive systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly diagnosed crazy and locked in a room with an genuine madman who believes himself in charge of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the entire orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the harsh ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with wit and inflexibility with a