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Every one of the finest playwrights extend the boundaries of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their own fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure subjects – from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the mystery of consciousness – and transform them into clever, imaginative and often touching plays. Drama, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a powerful glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Early Discovery

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly thanks to Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a brief lecture on two radio plays by a back then obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer ran up an constantly rising cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed perfectly courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the nature of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances causing our end. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the silence, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The typical fusion of daring ideas and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a major ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules followed an absolute, God-given law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the focus of a speech being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was clutching a stack of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became ever more visible. The key moment perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It asks a multitude of issues such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of private derangement and whether notions such as justice and national pride exist independent of our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened consciousness of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and free will, classicism and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, works because it is profoundly emotional. Ideas and feeling perfectly merge in a scene where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past cultures to which her tutor answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newtonian universe survives her tragically truncated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was infrequently doubted. What was debated, particularly in the early years, were his reservations about the effectiveness of art: something he frequently discussed in conversations. “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 qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a ongoing observation on wealth, wedlock, values, class, the fall of the nobility and the dominance of business. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a collection of works that deal to great effect with the violation of human rights by authoritarian governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist falsely pronounced crazy and locked in a room with an authentic psychiatric patient who thinks he is in control of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the cruel illogicalities of communist repression with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with wit and inflexibility with a