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Every one of the great dramatists push the frontiers of theatre. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their distinct manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized topics – from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of the mind – and turn them into witty, creative and frequently emotional theatrical works. Theatre, Laurence Olivier noted, is a great glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Encounter

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard early on. That was completely due to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to give a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a then obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer ran up an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed perfectly gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the nature of the media.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances causing our end. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The typical blend of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a big ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the topic of a lecture being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was holding a stack of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly visible. The key moment perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to reproduction. It poses a whole host of issues such as whether any public commitment is the result of personal instability and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist beyond our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute awareness of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is intensely touching. Concepts and feeling seamlessly come together in a moment where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past civilizations to which her instructor answers: “Scientific insights seen briefly and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the classical physics endures beyond her unfortunately cut short life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was infrequently challenged. What was discussed, notably in the initial period, were his doubts about the efficacy of theatre: something he frequently explored in conversations. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a running commentary on money, matrimony, values, social class, the fall of the nobility and the rise of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a series of works that engage to powerful results with the violation of human rights by oppressive regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic incorrectly diagnosed insane and locked in a cell with an real lunatic who thinks he is in command of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the full LSO on stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the brutal illogicalities of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with wit and inflexibility with a