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Every one of the outstanding playwrights push the frontiers of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their distinct fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized topics – from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the mystery of consciousness – and convert them into witty, inventive and frequently moving theatrical works. The stage, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a great glamorizer of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Early Discovery

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard early on. That was entirely due to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to give a short talk on two radio plays by a then unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer accumulated an constantly rising taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed perfectly polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the ways of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances leading to our demise. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the silence, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The typical combination of conceptual boldness and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a big moral issue: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an universal, God-given law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the topic of a talk being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was holding a stack of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the feeling of his plays became more and more visible. The breakthrough likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to restaging. It poses a multitude of issues such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of private derangement and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense realization of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and volition, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is intensely emotional. Thoughts and feeling perfectly coincide in a moment where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, laments the demise of past civilisations to which her tutor replies: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the classical physics endures beyond her sadly abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was rarely challenged. What was discussed, especially in the early years, were his doubts about the effectiveness of art: something he often talked about in discussions. “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 housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a continuous critique on wealth, matrimony, ethics, social class, the fall of the upper class and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a number of works that deal to great effect with the abuse of human rights by oppressive regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly diagnosed insane and confined in a cell with an genuine madman who believes himself in control of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the whole orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the brutal illogicalities of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with wit and strictness with a