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Every one of the finest playwrights broaden the limits of theatre. Beckett and Pinter did it in their unique manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric subjects – ranging from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the enigma of awareness – and turn them into witty, inventive and frequently emotional theatrical works. The stage, the actor Olivier noted, is a significant glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Discovery

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard early on. That was entirely due to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a back then obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer racked up an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained perfectly courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the nature of our world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances leading to our demise. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the quiet, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The typical combination of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a big moral issue: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether principles followed an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the topic of a lecture being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was clutching a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With time, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly visible. The breakthrough arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It raises a multitude of issues such as whether any civic duty is the result of private derangement and whether concepts such as fairness and national pride exist beyond our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute consciousness of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and free will, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is profoundly moving. Concepts and feeling seamlessly merge in a scene where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past civilisations to which her teacher answers: “Scientific insights glimpsed and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the Newton's world outlasts her unfortunately cut short life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was rarely challenged. What was debated, especially in the beginning, were his doubts about the power of theatre: something he regularly explored in interviews. “I used to feel alone,” 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 social 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 think he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a running commentary on wealth, matrimony, ethics, social class, the fall of the upper class and the dominance of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a number of works that deal to great effect with the misuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident wrongly pronounced crazy and locked in a chamber with an authentic psychiatric patient who thinks he is in control of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the entire LSO on stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the harsh ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a