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All the great dramatists push the boundaries of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their own way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized themes – from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of consciousness – and convert them into clever, inventive and often emotional dramas. The stage, Laurence Olivier noted, is a great glamorizer of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Early Encounter

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly thanks to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to present a mini-speech on two radio plays by a back then obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer ran up an skyrocketing cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained perfectly polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the ways of our world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, 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 cleverness in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances resulting in our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic combination of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a major moral issue: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions followed an unchanging, 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 watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the a library in London where he was gripping a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With time, the emotional content of his plays became ever more visible. The breakthrough perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to reproduction. It asks a whole host of issues such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of personal instability and whether ideas such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute awareness of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is deeply emotional. Ideas and feeling perfectly coincide in a scene where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past civilizations to which her teacher replies: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the Newton's world survives her unfortunately cut short life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was seldom questioned. What was contested, especially in the beginning, were his doubts about the efficacy of theatre: something he often discussed in conversations. “I used to feel isolated,” 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 avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a continuous critique on wealth, wedlock, ethics, status, the fall of the upper class and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a series of works that deal to great effect with the misuse of civil liberties by oppressive governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident wrongly pronounced mad and confined in a chamber with an real psychiatric patient who imagines himself in control of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the whole orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the harsh ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with wit and strictness with a