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Every one of the outstanding playwrights broaden the frontiers of theatre. Beckett and Pinter did it in their unique way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric themes – from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the mystery of consciousness – and turn them into witty, imaginative and regularly touching plays. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a great embellisher of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Initial Introduction

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard early on. That was wholly due to Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to present a short talk on two broadcast plays by a then unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer racked up an constantly rising cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained impeccably polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the workings of the media.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, 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 acclaimed for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The typical fusion of conceptual boldness and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a major philosophical question: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles followed an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the subject of a lecture being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was gripping a pile of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With time, the feeling of his plays became more and more apparent. The key moment arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to restaging. It asks a whole host of queries such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of individual madness and whether ideas such as justice and patriotism exist outside our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, works because it is deeply moving. Thoughts and feeling perfectly come together in a scene where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, laments the demise of past civilisations to which her tutor replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the classical physics survives her unfortunately truncated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was infrequently doubted. What was contested, notably in the initial period, were his doubts about the efficacy of drama: something he often talked about in conversations. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a continuous critique on wealth, matrimony, ethics, class, the decline of the upper class and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a collection of works that engage to powerful results with the violation of individual freedoms by dictatorial regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic falsely diagnosed insane and imprisoned in a cell with an genuine lunatic who thinks he is in control of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the brutal illogicalities of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a