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Every one of the finest playwrights push the boundaries of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their unique fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure themes – from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the puzzle of the mind – and turn them into humorous, imaginative and frequently emotional dramas. The stage, the actor Olivier once said, is a powerful embellisher of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Early Encounter

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely because of Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he requested that I to give a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a back then unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer racked up an ever escalating taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was exceptionally gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the ways of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances causing our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the quiet, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The typical fusion of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a major ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles obeyed an unchanging, divinely inspired 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 saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into 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 replied.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly evident. The turning point likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to revival. It poses a whole host of queries such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of private derangement and whether concepts such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense realization of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and choice, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, functions because it is intensely emotional. Thoughts and emotion flawlessly come together in a moment where a gifted youth, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past civilizations to which her instructor answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her tragically truncated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was infrequently doubted. What was discussed, notably in the beginning, were his reservations about the effectiveness of art: something he often discussed in discussions. “I used to feel out on a limb,” 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 hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a running commentary on wealth, matrimony, values, social class, the weakening of the nobility and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a series of works that engage to powerful results with the misuse of human rights by authoritarian governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly pronounced crazy and imprisoned in a chamber with an real madman who thinks he is in charge of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the entire LSO on the stage and to see Stoppard revealing the cruel ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with irony and inflexibility with a