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Every one of the outstanding dramatists push the boundaries of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their distinct fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized subjects – ranging from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the enigma of the mind – and turn them into clever, imaginative and regularly touching theatrical works. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a powerful glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Early Encounter

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard early on. That was wholly thanks to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to present a short talk on two broadcast plays by a at that time obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer accumulated an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was perfectly gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the workings of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the silence, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic combination of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a big moral issue: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether principles obeyed an absolute, God-given law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the focus of a speech being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was gripping a stack of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became more and more apparent. The key moment arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to restaging. It asks a multitude of questions such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of private derangement and whether notions such as justice and national pride exist independent of our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened consciousness of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and free will, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is intensely emotional. Ideas and sentiment perfectly merge in a segment where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past civilisations to which her tutor responds: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the Newton's world survives her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was infrequently doubted. What was discussed, particularly in the early years, were his reservations about the power of art: something he frequently 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 qualms about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a ongoing observation on finance, wedlock, values, social class, the weakening of the aristocracy and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a collection of works that grapple to significant impact with the abuse of human rights by oppressive regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist falsely declared crazy and locked in a chamber with an genuine lunatic who thinks he is in control of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the whole orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the cruel illogicalities of communist repression with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “force is met with irony and strictness with a