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All the finest playwrights extend the frontiers of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their distinct fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure topics – ranging from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the mystery of awareness – and convert them into clever, creative and regularly emotional theatrical works. Theatre, Laurence Olivier once said, is a great glamorizer of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Initial Encounter

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was completely thanks to Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to give a mini-speech on two radio plays by a back then unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer ran up an constantly rising taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed impeccably courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the workings of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its cleverness 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 resulting in our demise. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The typical fusion of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a major philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an absolute, God-given law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the focus of a speech being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the London Library where he was clutching a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly evident. The turning point likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It asks a whole host of questions such as whether any public commitment is the result of personal instability and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened awareness of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and volition, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, works because it is profoundly touching. Concepts and sentiment perfectly coincide in a segment where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past cultures to which her teacher replies: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the Newton's world endures beyond her tragically truncated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was seldom challenged. What was contested, particularly in the beginning, were his reservations about the effectiveness of art: something he often talked about in conversations. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person 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 avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a running commentary on finance, marriage, values, class, the fall of the upper class and the rise of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a series of works that deal to powerful results with the violation of civil liberties by dictatorial systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident incorrectly diagnosed crazy and confined in a chamber with an genuine lunatic who believes himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the full LSO on the stage and to see Stoppard revealing the harsh illogicalities of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and strictness with a