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Every one of the outstanding playwrights broaden the frontiers of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their unique way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric topics – from chaos theory to ethical thought and the puzzle of consciousness – and convert them into clever, inventive and often touching dramas. The stage, the actor Olivier noted, is a significant glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Early Encounter

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely due to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to give a short talk on two radio plays by a back then little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer ran up an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained impeccably courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the workings of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the quiet, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The typical blend of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a major moral issue: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether principles adhered to an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the subject of a lecture being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the London Library where he was clutching a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly visible. The key moment likely came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It poses a multitude of issues such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of personal instability and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute realization of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and free will, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly touching. Thoughts and sentiment perfectly come together in a scene where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past cultures to which her teacher replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the Newtonian universe survives her tragically abbreviated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was seldom questioned. What was discussed, especially in the beginning, were his doubts about the efficacy of drama: something he frequently 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 social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a continuous critique on money, matrimony, ethics, status, the decline of the upper class and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a series of works that engage to significant impact with the misuse of individual freedoms by oppressive regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic incorrectly pronounced mad and imprisoned in a room with an authentic psychiatric patient who imagines himself in charge of an symphony. It was startling both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard exposing the cruel ridiculousness of communist repression with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with wit and rigidity with a