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Every one of the great playwrights push the frontiers of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their unique fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized topics – ranging from chaos theory to ethical thought and the enigma of the mind – and convert them into humorous, creative and often emotional theatrical works. Drama, Laurence Olivier noted, is a great embellisher of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Early Introduction

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was completely due to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to present a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a at that time obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer accumulated an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their young author.

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

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, 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 commended for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our end. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the silence, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The typical fusion of daring ideas and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a major moral issue: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether principles obeyed an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the subject of a talk being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the anguish of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was clutching a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly apparent. The key moment arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to restaging. It poses a plethora of queries such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of private derangement and whether concepts such as fairness and patriotism exist beyond our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute awareness of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, works because it is deeply touching. Thoughts and emotion seamlessly merge in a segment where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past civilizations to which her instructor responds: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the Newtonian universe outlasts her unfortunately cut short life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was rarely challenged. What was contested, particularly in the beginning, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of theatre: something he often explored in interviews. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To refer obliquely 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 Oscar Wilde's work provides a continuous critique on money, marriage, ethics, status, the decline of the upper class and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a number of works that grapple to powerful results with the abuse of individual freedoms by authoritarian regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic falsely declared crazy and confined in a chamber with an genuine lunatic who thinks he is in charge of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the harsh absurdities of communist repression with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “force is met with irony and strictness with a