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Every one of the finest dramatists broaden the boundaries of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their own way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure topics – ranging from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the puzzle of consciousness – and turn them into witty, imaginative and regularly moving theatrical works. Theatre, the actor Olivier once said, is a great glamoriser of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Discovery

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard early on. That was wholly thanks to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to give a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a then obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer ran up an ever escalating taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed exceptionally courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the workings of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances causing our extinction. I remember 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 silence, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive fusion of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a significant moral issue: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the subject of a speech being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the London Library where he was gripping a pile of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became ever more evident. The turning point likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to reproduction. It poses a plethora of issues such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of private derangement and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, works because it is profoundly moving. Ideas and emotion seamlessly merge in a segment where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past civilizations to which her tutor replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her sadly abbreviated life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was rarely doubted. What was discussed, notably in the initial period, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of theatre: something he regularly talked about 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 compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a running commentary on wealth, marriage, morals, status, the decline of the upper class and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a series of works that engage to powerful results with the abuse of individual freedoms by authoritarian systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly pronounced crazy and locked in a chamber with an real madman who thinks he is in command of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the entire LSO on the stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the harsh illogicalities of communist repression with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a