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Every one of the finest playwrights push the boundaries of theatre. Beckett and Pinter did it in their unique way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric themes – from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the mystery of consciousness – and transform them into witty, creative and regularly emotional theatrical works. The stage, the actor Olivier once said, is a significant glamoriser of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Initial Discovery

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was completely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a back then obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer racked up an ever escalating cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet 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 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 grasped the workings of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances leading to our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the stillness, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The characteristic blend of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a major moral issue: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether principles obeyed an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the subject of a lecture being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the London Library where he was holding a pile of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly apparent. The turning point arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to restaging. It asks a whole host of questions such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of individual madness and whether ideas such as justice and national pride exist beyond our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense consciousness of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and choice, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, works because it is profoundly emotional. Thoughts and emotion seamlessly coincide in a segment where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past cultures to which her instructor responds: “Scientific insights seen briefly and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the Newton's world outlasts her tragically cut short life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was rarely doubted. What was debated, notably in the early years, were his doubts about the power of theatre: something he often talked about in discussions. “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 qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a ongoing observation on money, matrimony, morals, status, the decline of the nobility and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a number of works that grapple to powerful results with the violation of individual freedoms by dictatorial regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident wrongly declared crazy and locked in a cell with an real madman who believes himself in command of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the harsh ridiculousness of communist repression with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with irony and inflexibility with a