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All the great playwrights broaden the boundaries of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their distinct way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure themes – from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the puzzle of awareness – and convert them into witty, inventive and regularly emotional plays. The stage, the actor Olivier once said, is a powerful embellisher of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Early Introduction

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 invited me to give a short talk on two audio dramas by a back then obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer ran up an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained exceptionally polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the workings of our world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember the actor 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 quiet, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic combination of daring ideas and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a significant philosophical question: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles obeyed an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the focus of a lecture being developed by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the risks of a unraveling 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 Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the London Library where he was holding a pile of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the years, the feeling of his plays became ever more evident. The turning point likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to revival. It raises a whole host of questions such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of private derangement and whether concepts such as justice and patriotism exist beyond our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense awareness of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is intensely touching. Ideas and feeling perfectly come together in a scene where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past cultures to which her tutor answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newton's world survives her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was seldom challenged. What was discussed, particularly in the early years, were his reservations about the effectiveness of art: something he regularly talked about in conversations. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a continuous critique on finance, wedlock, ethics, status, the weakening of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a number of works that grapple to great effect with the abuse of human rights by dictatorial systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly diagnosed insane and imprisoned in a room with an real lunatic who imagines himself in control of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the entire orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the brutal ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a