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Every one of the outstanding playwrights push the frontiers of drama. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their distinct manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized subjects – ranging from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the enigma of the mind – and transform them into clever, inventive and often touching theatrical works. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a great glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Initial Encounter

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly because of a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to give a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a then obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer ran up an constantly rising cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet 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 sniffy opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed perfectly courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the ways of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the silence, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive combination of daring ideas and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a significant moral issue: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules followed an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the topic of a talk being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting 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 answered.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly apparent. The key moment arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to revival. It asks a multitude of questions such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of personal instability and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense consciousness of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and choice, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is profoundly emotional. Concepts and feeling seamlessly come together in a scene where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past civilisations to which her instructor replies: “Scientific insights seen briefly and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her tragically abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was rarely challenged. What was contested, particularly in the initial period, were his reservations about the efficacy of theatre: something he frequently discussed in interviews. “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 the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a continuous critique on finance, matrimony, ethics, status, the decline of the nobility and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a number of works that deal to significant impact with the misuse of human rights by oppressive governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly declared mad and confined in a chamber with an authentic psychiatric patient who believes himself in command of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the full LSO on the stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the brutal illogicalities of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with wit and inflexibility with a