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Every one of the great playwrights broaden the frontiers of theatre. Beckett and Pinter did it in their distinct way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric topics – ranging from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of awareness – and transform them into witty, creative and frequently moving dramas. Theatre, Laurence Olivier noted, is a powerful glamoriser of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Early Introduction

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he asked me to present a brief lecture on two radio plays by a then obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer ran up an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed perfectly gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the ways of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances leading to our end. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the stillness, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic fusion of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a major moral issue: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules followed an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the topic of a talk being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the London Library where he was gripping a pile of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became ever more visible. The turning point perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to reproduction. It raises a whole host of issues such as whether any civic duty is the result of personal instability and whether ideas such as fairness and national pride exist outside our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense awareness of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and free will, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is deeply emotional. Concepts and sentiment perfectly coincide in a segment where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past civilisations to which her tutor answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newton's world endures beyond her sadly abbreviated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was seldom challenged. What was discussed, particularly in the early years, were his skepticism about the power of drama: something he often explored in interviews. “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 social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a running commentary on finance, matrimony, values, social class, the weakening of the aristocracy and the rise of business. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a number of works that engage to powerful results with the misuse of individual freedoms by oppressive regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic incorrectly diagnosed insane and imprisoned in a room with an genuine madman who imagines himself in charge of an symphony. It was startling both to see the full orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the cruel illogicalities of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with irony and inflexibility with a