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Every one of the great playwrights push the frontiers of theatre. Beckett and Pinter did it in their own fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure subjects – ranging from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the mystery of the mind – and turn them into clever, creative and regularly emotional theatrical works. The stage, the actor Olivier remarked, is a powerful embellisher of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Discovery

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard early on. That was completely due to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to present a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a back then little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer ran up an constantly rising cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was perfectly courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the workings of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The typical combination of daring ideas and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a big philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the focus of a lecture being developed by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was gripping a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became more and more visible. The turning point arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It asks a whole host of issues such as whether any public commitment is the result of personal instability and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist beyond our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute realization of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and free will, classicism and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, works because it is intensely emotional. Concepts and sentiment perfectly merge in a segment where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past civilizations to which her tutor responds: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the classical physics outlasts her sadly cut short life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was infrequently doubted. What was debated, notably in the early years, were his reservations about the power of theatre: something he frequently talked about in discussions. “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 Vietnam or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a continuous critique on money, marriage, morals, social class, the weakening of the nobility and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a number of works that deal to significant impact with the misuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic falsely diagnosed insane and locked in a chamber with an real madman who imagines himself in command of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the cruel illogicalities of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “force is met with wit and inflexibility with a