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All the finest playwrights extend the boundaries of theatre. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their distinct way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure subjects – from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the puzzle of consciousness – and turn them into witty, creative and frequently touching dramas. Theatre, Laurence Olivier once said, is a powerful embellisher of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Discovery

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard early on. That was wholly due to Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to present a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a back then obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer accumulated an skyrocketing cab fare. 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 impressed by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained impeccably gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the nature of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, 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 ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances causing our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the silence, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive combination of conceptual boldness and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a big philosophical question: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the focus 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 pain of a broken marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was clutching a mound of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With time, the emotional content of his plays became more and more visible. The turning point arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to reproduction. It asks a whole host of questions such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of private derangement and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist outside our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense realization of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and volition, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a host of other things, functions because it is deeply emotional. Ideas and feeling perfectly come together in a moment where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past civilizations to which her teacher replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newtonian universe survives her tragically truncated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was infrequently questioned. What was contested, notably in the early years, were his reservations about the efficacy of theatre: something he regularly explored 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 the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a ongoing observation on finance, matrimony, morals, social class, the decline of the nobility and the dominance of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a series of works that engage to significant impact with the violation of civil liberties by authoritarian governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly declared insane and imprisoned in a room with an genuine lunatic who believes himself in command of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the full orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the brutal ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with irony and strictness with a