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Every one of the great playwrights push the frontiers of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their own fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric themes – ranging from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the enigma of consciousness – and turn them into clever, creative and frequently emotional theatrical works. The stage, the actor Olivier noted, is a great embellisher of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Introduction

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard early on. That was completely because of Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a short talk on two radio plays by a then obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer racked up an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained perfectly polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the nature of our world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances causing our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the silence, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive combination of intellectual audacity and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a significant moral issue: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the topic of a talk being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was holding a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became more and more apparent. The key moment perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to revival. It asks a multitude of questions such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of personal instability and whether ideas such as justice and patriotism exist independent of our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened realization of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and volition, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly touching. Ideas and emotion perfectly merge in a moment where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past cultures to which her instructor replies: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the classical physics survives her tragically truncated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was infrequently questioned. What was debated, especially in the early years, were his reservations about the power of theatre: 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 social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a ongoing observation on money, wedlock, values, class, the decline of the upper class and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a series of works that engage to great effect with the abuse of individual freedoms by oppressive regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly pronounced mad and locked in a chamber with an real psychiatric patient who imagines himself in command of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard exposing the brutal ridiculousness of communist repression with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a