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All the finest dramatists broaden the boundaries of theatre. Beckett and Pinter did it in their distinct fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized themes – from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the enigma of consciousness – and turn them into witty, creative and frequently moving plays. The stage, the actor Olivier remarked, is a significant glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Discovery

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely because of Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to give a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a back then obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer racked up an constantly rising cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained exceptionally gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the ways of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the quiet, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The typical blend of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a significant philosophical question: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether principles obeyed an absolute, God-given law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the topic of a lecture being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was holding a mound of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With time, the emotional content of his plays became more and more evident. The turning point perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to revival. It asks a plethora of issues such as whether any public commitment is the result of personal instability and whether ideas such as fairness and national pride exist outside our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened consciousness of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and choice, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is deeply moving. Thoughts and feeling perfectly merge in a moment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past civilizations to which her instructor responds: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the Newton's world survives her sadly cut short life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was infrequently questioned. What was debated, especially in the early years, were his doubts about the efficacy of theatre: something he regularly 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 Vietnam 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 believe he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a running commentary on finance, wedlock, morals, class, the decline of the nobility and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a number of works that grapple to significant impact with the misuse of civil liberties by authoritarian systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist falsely declared crazy and imprisoned in a chamber with an real madman who thinks he is in control of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the cruel ridiculousness of communist repression with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with irony and rigidity with a