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Every one of the outstanding playwrights broaden the frontiers of theatre. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their own fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized subjects – ranging from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the puzzle of consciousness – and transform them into clever, inventive and frequently touching theatrical works. Drama, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a great glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Encounter

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard early on. That was completely because of a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a at that time unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer racked up an ever escalating taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed impeccably polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the workings of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by character and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances causing our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The typical fusion of conceptual boldness and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a significant moral issue: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions followed an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the topic of a lecture being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Revelation

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

With time, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly visible. The key moment perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to restaging. It poses a multitude of issues such as whether any civic duty is the result of personal instability and whether concepts such as justice and patriotism exist beyond our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense realization of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and volition, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is deeply moving. Concepts and sentiment flawlessly merge in a moment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past civilisations to which her instructor responds: “Scientific insights seen briefly and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the classical physics outlasts her sadly truncated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was rarely questioned. What was debated, especially in the beginning, were his skepticism about the efficacy of theatre: something he frequently discussed in conversations. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a ongoing observation on money, marriage, values, class, the fall of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a collection of works that grapple to great effect with the misuse of individual freedoms by oppressive governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist falsely declared mad and confined in a cell with an authentic lunatic who thinks he is in control of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the entire orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the brutal illogicalities of communist repression with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with irony and inflexibility with a