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Every one of the great playwrights extend the boundaries of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their distinct fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric themes – ranging from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the enigma of awareness – and turn them into clever, inventive and frequently emotional theatrical works. Drama, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a powerful glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Introduction

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard early on. That was wholly thanks to Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to give a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a at that time unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer ran up an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was perfectly courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the workings of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances causing our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the quiet, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The distinctive blend of conceptual boldness and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a significant philosophical question: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether principles followed an universal, God-given law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the focus of a talk being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a fractured marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a former minister of agriculture 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 amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, shortly before 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 replied.

With the years, the feeling of his plays became increasingly visible. The breakthrough arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to revival. It poses a plethora of questions such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of personal instability and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened consciousness of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and volition, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is deeply touching. Thoughts and emotion perfectly coincide in a scene where a gifted youth, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past civilizations to which her tutor answers: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the Newtonian universe outlasts her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was rarely questioned. What was discussed, especially in the early years, were his reservations about the efficacy of art: something he often explored in conversations. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a ongoing observation on finance, wedlock, morals, social class, the decline of the upper class and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a number of works that grapple to powerful results with the misuse of individual freedoms by authoritarian systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic wrongly diagnosed crazy and locked in a chamber with an genuine psychiatric patient who believes himself in charge of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the whole orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard exposing the brutal ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a