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All the finest playwrights broaden the frontiers of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their unique fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric themes – ranging from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the puzzle of the mind – and transform them into witty, creative and frequently emotional plays. Theatre, the actor Olivier noted, is a powerful glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Early Introduction

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely thanks to Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he invited me to present a short talk on two radio plays by a back then unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer ran up an constantly rising taxi bill. And in 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 emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained exceptionally gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the workings of our world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the quiet, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive blend of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a major philosophical question: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions followed an universal, God-given law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the subject of a talk being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the anguish of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the London Library where he was holding a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became ever more visible. The turning point arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It poses a plethora of questions such as whether any civic duty is the result of private derangement and whether concepts such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense awareness of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and free will, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is profoundly moving. Thoughts and feeling flawlessly come together in a moment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, laments the demise of past civilizations to which her instructor responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the Newtonian universe survives her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was rarely questioned. What was debated, especially in the initial period, were his skepticism about the efficacy of theatre: something he often explored in conversations. “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 the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no qualms 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 completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a ongoing observation on wealth, marriage, morals, social class, the decline of the nobility and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a number of works that engage to significant impact with the misuse of civil liberties by dictatorial systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident wrongly diagnosed mad and imprisoned in a cell with an genuine lunatic who believes himself in command of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the full orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard exposing the cruel illogicalities of communist repression with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a