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Every one of the great dramatists broaden the frontiers of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their distinct way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric themes – from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the mystery of the mind – and convert them into witty, creative and frequently moving theatrical works. Drama, the actor Olivier noted, is a powerful glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Encounter

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was completely due to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a at that time little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer racked up an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed exceptionally courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the nature of our world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances causing our end. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the quiet, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The characteristic fusion of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a major philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles obeyed an universal, God-given law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the focus of a speech being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the London Library where he was holding a stack of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With time, the feeling of his plays became increasingly evident. The breakthrough arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to reproduction. It asks a multitude of queries such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of individual madness and whether ideas such as fairness and national pride exist beyond our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense realization of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and free will, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, works because it is profoundly moving. Concepts and sentiment seamlessly coincide in a moment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past civilisations to which her instructor responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the Newtonian universe survives her tragically abbreviated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was infrequently doubted. What was discussed, particularly in the initial period, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of art: something he frequently discussed in discussions. “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 Vietnam or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a ongoing observation on finance, wedlock, morals, status, the fall of the aristocracy and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a number of works that engage to great effect with the misuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic falsely pronounced crazy and imprisoned in a room with an genuine madman who thinks he is in charge of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the cruel illogicalities of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and strictness with a