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Every one of the finest playwrights push the frontiers of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their own fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric topics – ranging from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the mystery of consciousness – and convert them into clever, inventive and frequently touching plays. Theatre, the actor Olivier remarked, is a powerful glamoriser of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Introduction

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard early on. That was entirely because of Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to present a short talk on two audio dramas by a back then obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer ran up an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed exceptionally polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the ways of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the quiet, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The distinctive fusion of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a big ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your usual theatrical topic, 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 failing marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs 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 responded.

With time, the feeling of his plays became more and more visible. The breakthrough arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to revival. It raises a whole host of issues such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of individual madness and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute realization of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and volition, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, works because it is intensely touching. Ideas and sentiment seamlessly merge in a moment where a gifted youth, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past civilizations to which her teacher responds: “Scientific insights caught sight of and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the Newton's world outlasts her sadly truncated life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was seldom challenged. What was discussed, particularly in the early years, were his doubts about the power of drama: something he frequently discussed in discussions. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a ongoing observation on money, wedlock, morals, status, the fall of the upper class and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a series of works that engage to powerful results with the violation of individual freedoms by authoritarian regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic incorrectly declared insane and confined in a chamber with an real psychiatric patient who thinks he is in command of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the whole LSO on stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the harsh absurdities of communist repression with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with wit and rigidity with a