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Every one of the outstanding dramatists push the frontiers of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their distinct manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric themes – ranging from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the mystery of consciousness – and convert them into witty, creative and frequently emotional theatrical works. Theatre, the actor Olivier remarked, is a great glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Early Introduction

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard early on. That was wholly thanks to Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a short talk on two radio plays by a back then little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer ran up an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained impeccably courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the nature of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The distinctive combination of conceptual boldness and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a big moral issue: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether principles followed an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the subject of a speech being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the a library in London where he was holding a mound of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With time, the emotional content of his plays became more and more visible. The key moment arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It raises a whole host of queries such as whether any social obligation is the result of individual madness and whether concepts such as fairness and national pride exist outside our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute realization of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and choice, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is profoundly touching. Ideas and emotion perfectly coincide in a scene where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, laments the demise of past civilisations to which her instructor responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her sadly abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was seldom challenged. What was discussed, notably in the early years, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of drama: something he frequently discussed in discussions. “I used to feel isolated,” 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 compunction about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a running commentary on wealth, matrimony, morals, class, the fall of the aristocracy and the rise of business. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a number of works that grapple to powerful results with the violation of civil liberties by oppressive systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly pronounced mad and imprisoned in a chamber with an real madman who believes himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the full orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the brutal ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with wit and strictness with a