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All the great playwrights extend the frontiers of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their own manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure topics – ranging from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the enigma of awareness – and convert them into clever, imaginative and frequently touching theatrical works. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a powerful embellisher of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Encounter

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly thanks to Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a brief lecture on two radio plays by a back then unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer ran up an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was impeccably courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the nature of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances causing our extinction. I remember the actor 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 pushing back the silence, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The typical combination of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a major ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the subject of a lecture being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was clutching a mound of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With time, the feeling of his plays became increasingly apparent. The turning point arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It asks a plethora of queries such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of individual madness and whether ideas such as justice and national pride exist independent of our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute awareness of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, works because it is profoundly touching. Ideas and emotion flawlessly come together in a segment where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past civilizations to which her teacher responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the Newton's world survives her tragically abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was rarely challenged. What was contested, especially in the initial period, were his doubts about the effectiveness of art: something he regularly explored in conversations. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a continuous critique on wealth, wedlock, morals, status, the weakening of the nobility and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own position 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 Deserves Favour, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident falsely pronounced crazy and locked in a chamber with an genuine lunatic who imagines himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the harsh ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with wit and strictness with a