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Every one of the finest playwrights broaden the frontiers of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their own way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure subjects – ranging from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the mystery of consciousness – and transform them into witty, inventive and often emotional theatrical works. The stage, the actor Olivier remarked, is a significant glamoriser of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Encounter

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard early on. That was wholly thanks to Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to give a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a then little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer racked up an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed exceptionally polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the ways of our world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances causing our end. 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 beating back the silence, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The typical fusion of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a big philosophical question: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions followed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the subject of a lecture being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the anguish of a fractured marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the London Library where he was clutching a pile of books that reached up 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 key moment arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to reproduction. It asks a plethora of issues such as whether any social obligation is the result of personal instability and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist beyond our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened realization of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and volition, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, works because it is deeply touching. Thoughts and emotion seamlessly merge in a segment where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past cultures to which her tutor replies: “Scientific insights glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the Newtonian universe survives her unfortunately cut short life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was rarely challenged. What was discussed, notably in the beginning, were his reservations about the power of theatre: something he frequently explored in discussions. “I used to feel isolated,” 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 hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a continuous critique on finance, wedlock, ethics, status, the weakening of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a number of works that grapple to significant impact with the abuse of civil liberties by oppressive systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident wrongly declared mad and locked in a cell with an real psychiatric patient who thinks he is in command of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the cruel ridiculousness of communist repression with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with wit and rigidity with a