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Every one of the great playwrights broaden the frontiers of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their distinct way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized subjects – from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of consciousness – and convert them into humorous, inventive and frequently moving plays. Theatre, Laurence Olivier noted, is a significant glamoriser of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Initial Encounter

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely due to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to present a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a at that time obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer ran up an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained impeccably courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the workings of the media.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances leading to our demise. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the silence, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic blend of daring ideas and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a significant philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules followed an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the topic of a talk being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the anguish of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the London Library where he was holding a pile of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly visible. The turning point perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It raises a whole host of questions such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of private derangement and whether concepts such as justice and national pride exist outside our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened awareness of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and free will, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a host of other things, functions because it is intensely moving. Thoughts and sentiment flawlessly come together in a moment where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past cultures to which her tutor replies: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the classical physics endures beyond her sadly abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was seldom doubted. What was contested, especially in the beginning, were his doubts about the effectiveness of theatre: something he regularly discussed 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 housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a ongoing observation on finance, marriage, ethics, class, the fall of the nobility and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a number of works that grapple to powerful results with the misuse of human rights by oppressive systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist falsely declared crazy and locked in a room with an authentic lunatic who imagines himself in control of an symphony. It was startling both to see the full orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the harsh illogicalities of communist repression with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with irony and inflexibility with a