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All the great dramatists push the frontiers of theatre. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their own way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure themes – ranging from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the mystery of awareness – and turn them into clever, imaginative and often emotional plays. The stage, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a great 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 entirely thanks to Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to present a short talk on two radio plays by a then obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer ran up an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night 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 understood the workings of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances causing our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive combination of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a big philosophical question: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the subject of a speech being developed by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the London Library where he was holding a mound 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 ever more visible. The key moment likely came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to reproduction. It raises a plethora of issues such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of individual madness and whether concepts such as fairness and national pride exist outside our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened awareness of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and free will, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, works because it is deeply emotional. Thoughts and emotion seamlessly coincide in a segment where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, laments the demise of past civilizations to which her instructor responds: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the classical physics survives her sadly cut short life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was rarely questioned. What was discussed, especially in the initial period, were his skepticism about the efficacy of theatre: something he regularly talked about in interviews. “I used to feel out on a limb,” 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 compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The 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 finance, wedlock, values, status, the weakening of the upper class and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a number of works that deal to great effect with the misuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident incorrectly pronounced mad and imprisoned in a cell with an genuine psychiatric patient who thinks he is in command of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the full orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard exposing the harsh illogicalities of communist repression with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and strictness with a