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Every one of the great dramatists extend the frontiers of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their unique manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure topics – ranging from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the mystery of awareness – and convert them into clever, imaginative and regularly moving plays. The stage, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a significant glamoriser of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Early Discovery

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was completely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a short talk on two audio dramas by a back then unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer ran up an ever escalating taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed impeccably polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the nature of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the quiet, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive combination of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a significant moral issue: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the topic of a talk being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a fractured marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs of the London Library where he was clutching a mound of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With time, the feeling of his plays became ever more apparent. The breakthrough perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to revival. It raises a plethora of issues such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of personal instability and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense realization of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, works because it is intensely touching. Concepts and sentiment perfectly coincide in a moment where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past civilizations to which her instructor responds: “Scientific insights caught sight of and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the classical physics endures beyond her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was seldom questioned. What was debated, especially in the early years, were his reservations about the power of art: something he regularly discussed in interviews. “I used to feel alone,” 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 social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a ongoing observation on finance, marriage, values, social class, the weakening of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a series of works that deal to great effect with the abuse of civil liberties by dictatorial systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident incorrectly declared crazy and confined in a cell with an authentic madman who imagines himself in command of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the entire LSO on stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the harsh illogicalities of communist repression with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a