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Every one of the outstanding playwrights push the frontiers of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their distinct fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure subjects – ranging from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the puzzle of the mind – and turn them into humorous, inventive and frequently touching plays. The stage, the actor Olivier noted, is a significant glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Encounter

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely due to Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a short talk on two audio dramas by a back then little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer racked up an skyrocketing cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was perfectly gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the ways of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances leading to our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive fusion of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a big moral issue: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles adhered to an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the subject of a speech being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – 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, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the London Library where he was gripping a pile of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became more and more evident. The key moment likely came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to revival. It raises a whole host of questions such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of individual madness and whether notions such as justice and patriotism exist outside our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense awareness of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and choice, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is profoundly moving. Thoughts and emotion seamlessly come together in a scene where a gifted youth, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past civilizations to which her teacher answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the Newtonian universe survives her tragically cut short life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was seldom challenged. What was debated, especially in the early years, were his doubts about the effectiveness of theatre: something he regularly explored in interviews. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a running commentary on finance, marriage, morals, social class, the weakening of the aristocracy and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a series of works that grapple to powerful results with the misuse of individual freedoms by authoritarian governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic falsely diagnosed crazy and imprisoned in a room with an genuine lunatic who imagines himself in charge of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the brutal ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with wit and rigidity with a