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Every one of the great playwrights push the frontiers of theatre. Beckett and Pinter did it in their distinct way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure subjects – ranging from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the puzzle of the mind – and convert them into witty, inventive and regularly moving theatrical works. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a powerful glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Discovery

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a at that time little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer accumulated an ever escalating taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was impeccably polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the workings of the media.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances causing our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the quiet, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The typical combination of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a big ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the topic of a talk being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the a library in London where he was gripping 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 more and more apparent. The turning point perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to restaging. It asks a whole host of issues such as whether any civic duty is the result of personal instability and whether ideas such as justice and national pride exist outside our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute consciousness of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and volition, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, works because it is deeply moving. Concepts and emotion seamlessly coincide in a scene where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past civilizations to which her instructor replies: “Scientific insights seen briefly and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the Newtonian universe outlasts her unfortunately truncated life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was infrequently questioned. What was debated, especially in the initial period, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of drama: something he frequently discussed in conversations. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a continuous critique on finance, marriage, morals, status, the decline of the nobility and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a number of works that grapple to great effect with the misuse of human rights by authoritarian regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly diagnosed mad and confined in a room with an genuine psychiatric patient who imagines himself in command of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the whole orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard revealing the harsh illogicalities of communist repression with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with wit and strictness with a