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All the outstanding playwrights extend the frontiers of theatre. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their unique fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric themes – from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the mystery of awareness – and turn them into clever, creative and regularly emotional dramas. The stage, Laurence Olivier noted, is a powerful glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Discovery

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was completely because of Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a back then obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer ran up an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed exceptionally gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the nature of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances resulting in 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 dialogue is all. The word is beating back the quiet, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The typical fusion of daring ideas and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a big philosophical question: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the focus of a talk being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs of the a library in London 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 ever more visible. The breakthrough likely came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to reproduction. It asks a multitude of issues such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of personal instability and whether ideas such as fairness and national pride exist outside our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense awareness of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, functions because it is deeply moving. Ideas and feeling perfectly merge in a segment where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past civilizations to which her teacher responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the Newton's world survives her tragically cut short life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was infrequently challenged. What was contested, particularly in the initial period, were his doubts about the efficacy of drama: something he often talked about in conversations. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a continuous critique on wealth, matrimony, ethics, social class, the decline of the aristocracy and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a collection of works that engage to great effect with the abuse of individual freedoms by authoritarian regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly declared crazy and locked in a room with an authentic lunatic who believes himself in charge of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the whole orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the cruel ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with wit and inflexibility with a