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Every one of the finest dramatists broaden the frontiers of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their distinct fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized subjects – from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the puzzle of the mind – and transform them into witty, imaginative and often touching plays. The stage, Laurence Olivier noted, is a powerful embellisher of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Introduction

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard early on. That was entirely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to give a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a then obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer racked up an skyrocketing cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and eventually met 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 dismissive premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was exceptionally courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the workings of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the stillness, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The typical combination of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a significant ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an universal, God-given law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the topic of a lecture being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the London Library where he was clutching a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became ever more apparent. The turning point likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to revival. It raises a whole host of issues such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of personal instability and whether ideas such as justice and patriotism exist outside our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute realization of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly touching. Thoughts and sentiment flawlessly merge in a moment where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past civilisations to which her tutor answers: “Scientific insights seen briefly and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the Newton's world outlasts her unfortunately truncated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was rarely challenged. What was contested, notably in the early years, were his doubts about the effectiveness of theatre: something he often talked about in interviews. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a ongoing observation on finance, matrimony, ethics, status, the weakening of the aristocracy and the rise of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a number of works that grapple to great effect with the misuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident wrongly declared crazy and imprisoned in a room with an genuine psychiatric patient who believes himself in command of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the cruel illogicalities of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with wit and strictness with a