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Every one of the outstanding dramatists extend the frontiers of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their unique fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure subjects – ranging from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the mystery of awareness – and turn them into witty, inventive and regularly moving theatrical works. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a great glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Initial Encounter

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard early on. That was completely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to give a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a then little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer accumulated an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed exceptionally gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the ways of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we later 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 commended for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances causing our demise. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the silence, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The typical combination of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a big philosophical question: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the focus of a speech being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Emotional Revelation

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 carefully studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the a library in London where he was holding a mound of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the years, the feeling of his plays became ever more visible. The turning point perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It asks a multitude of queries such as whether any public commitment is the result of private derangement and whether ideas such as justice and national pride exist outside our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute realization of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and volition, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is deeply emotional. Ideas and feeling flawlessly merge in a moment where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past civilisations to which her tutor replies: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her tragically cut short life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was seldom questioned. What was debated, notably in the early years, were his skepticism about the efficacy of drama: something he often explored in conversations. “I used to feel out on a limb,” 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 qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a ongoing observation on wealth, marriage, values, social class, the fall of the nobility and the dominance of business. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a series of works that engage to significant impact with the abuse of civil liberties by authoritarian regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident incorrectly pronounced mad and locked in a cell with an genuine lunatic who thinks he is in charge of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the harsh ridiculousness of communist repression with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with wit and rigidity with a