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Every one of the outstanding playwrights broaden the boundaries of drama. Beckett and Pinter did it in their own way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure topics – ranging from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the enigma of awareness – and convert them into humorous, creative and frequently emotional theatrical works. The stage, Laurence Olivier once said, is a significant glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Early Discovery

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely due to Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to present a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a at that time unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer racked up an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed impeccably courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the nature of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we in time 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 minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The distinctive blend of conceptual boldness and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a big philosophical question: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an unchanging, God-given law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the topic of a talk being developed by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the London Library where he was clutching a mound of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With time, the emotional content of his plays became more and more visible. The key moment arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to revival. It asks a multitude of issues such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of private derangement and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense awareness of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and choice, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, works because it is profoundly emotional. Concepts and feeling flawlessly coincide in a segment where a gifted youth, Thomasina, laments the loss of past cultures to which her instructor responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newtonian universe outlasts her unfortunately truncated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was seldom doubted. What was debated, particularly in the initial period, were his doubts about the power of theatre: something he often discussed in discussions. “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 the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a running commentary on money, matrimony, ethics, class, the weakening of the upper class and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a number of works that grapple to great effect with the misuse of civil liberties by authoritarian systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic incorrectly pronounced crazy and locked in a room with an authentic madman who believes himself in charge of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the full LSO on stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the brutal absurdities of communist repression with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and strictness with a