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Every one of the outstanding playwrights broaden the boundaries of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their distinct manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric subjects – ranging from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the mystery of the mind – and convert them into witty, creative and often touching plays. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a powerful glamoriser of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Early Discovery

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly because of Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to give a short talk on two radio plays by a at that time obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer racked up an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed perfectly courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the nature of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the quiet, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The typical combination of daring ideas and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a big moral issue: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions followed an universal, God-given law. Not your typical subject for a play, 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 realised that it was also about the anguish of a fractured marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the London Library where he was gripping a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became more and more apparent. The turning point perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to restaging. It poses a multitude of issues such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of individual madness and whether notions such as justice and patriotism exist independent of our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense consciousness of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and volition, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, works because it is intensely emotional. Thoughts and sentiment seamlessly coincide in a segment where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, laments the demise of past civilisations to which her instructor replies: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her tragically truncated life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was infrequently challenged. What was contested, particularly in the beginning, were his reservations about the power of theatre: something he regularly explored in interviews. “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 Vietnam or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a continuous critique on money, wedlock, ethics, class, the decline of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a collection of works that grapple to powerful results with the abuse of individual freedoms by authoritarian systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic falsely declared crazy and locked in a room with an real madman who imagines himself in charge of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the full LSO on the stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the brutal absurdities of communist repression with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with wit and inflexibility with a