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Every one of the great playwrights extend the frontiers of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their distinct fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric subjects – ranging from chaos theory to ethical thought and the puzzle of the mind – and turn them into witty, inventive and regularly touching theatrical works. Drama, Laurence Olivier noted, is a powerful embellisher of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Introduction

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely due to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to present a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a at that time unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer ran up an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was impeccably gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the nature of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by character and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was always a political playwright, 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 ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances causing our extinction. I remember the actor 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 beating back the stillness, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The typical blend of daring ideas and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a big moral issue: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an absolute, God-given law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the subject of a lecture being prepared by the play’s protagonist, 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 dangers of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the entrance of the London Library where he was gripping a mound of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With time, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly apparent. The key moment perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to restaging. It poses a multitude of queries such as whether any social obligation is the result of personal instability and whether concepts such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense awareness of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and volition, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is profoundly emotional. Ideas and emotion perfectly merge in a moment where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, laments the loss of past cultures to which her instructor responds: “Scientific insights caught sight of and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newton's world endures beyond her tragically cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was infrequently questioned. What was discussed, particularly in the early years, were his reservations about the efficacy of theatre: something he frequently explored in conversations. “I used to feel alone,” 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], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a ongoing observation on money, marriage, morals, class, the fall of the aristocracy and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a series of works that deal to significant impact with the violation of civil liberties by oppressive systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist falsely declared mad and locked in a chamber with an genuine madman who believes himself in control of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the full orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard revealing the brutal illogicalities of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with wit and strictness with a