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Every one of the outstanding playwrights push the frontiers of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their distinct manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric subjects – from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of awareness – and convert them into clever, inventive and frequently moving plays. Theatre, Laurence Olivier once said, is a great glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Discovery

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely due to Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a short talk on two broadcast plays by a at that time little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer racked up an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was impressed by the ingenuity 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 been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained impeccably gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the nature of our world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances leading to our demise. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the stillness, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The typical combination of daring ideas and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a significant ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the subject of a speech being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a fractured marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the a library in London where he was clutching a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With time, the feeling of his plays became more and more visible. The turning point likely came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to revival. It poses a whole host of queries such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of personal instability and whether concepts such as justice and national pride exist independent of our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense realization of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and free will, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is intensely touching. Ideas and sentiment flawlessly come together in a scene where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past cultures to which her instructor answers: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe survives her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was infrequently challenged. What was debated, notably in the initial period, were his reservations about the efficacy of drama: something he regularly discussed in interviews. “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 housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a continuous critique on money, matrimony, values, status, the weakening of the nobility and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a number of works that grapple to powerful results with the misuse of human rights by authoritarian governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident falsely pronounced mad and confined in a cell with an genuine madman who imagines himself in command of an symphony. It was startling both to see the whole LSO on the stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the cruel ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a