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Every one of the finest dramatists broaden the frontiers of theatre. Beckett and Pinter did it in their unique fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure topics – ranging from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the puzzle of the mind – and convert them into witty, creative and often emotional dramas. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a great glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Introduction

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a then little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer racked up an constantly rising taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed impeccably courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the nature of our world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances causing our end. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the silence, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive combination of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a major ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether principles followed an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the focus of a talk being prepared 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 fractured marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was holding a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became ever more evident. The breakthrough perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to revival. It poses a multitude of queries such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of private derangement and whether concepts such as justice and national pride exist outside our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and free will, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a host of other things, works because it is profoundly moving. Concepts and feeling flawlessly coincide in a segment where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, laments the demise of past civilisations to which her tutor responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the Newtonian universe survives her unfortunately truncated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was infrequently challenged. What was debated, notably in the beginning, were his doubts about the effectiveness of art: something he often talked about in interviews. “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 compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a continuous critique on finance, wedlock, values, social class, the weakening of the nobility and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a series of works that grapple to significant impact with the misuse of civil liberties by authoritarian systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident falsely declared insane and confined in a room with an genuine lunatic who imagines himself in charge of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the whole orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the cruel illogicalities of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a