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Every one of the outstanding playwrights push the frontiers of drama. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their distinct way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure subjects – ranging from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the enigma of awareness – and turn them into witty, inventive and regularly touching plays. The stage, the actor Olivier remarked, is a powerful glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Early Encounter

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly because of Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to present a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a then obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer ran up an ever escalating taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was impeccably courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the ways of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by concepts 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 intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances causing our demise. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the stillness, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The typical blend of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a significant ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an universal, God-given law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the subject of a talk being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the anguish of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was holding a stack of books that reached up 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 evident. The turning point arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to revival. It raises a multitude of questions such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of individual madness and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist outside our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense consciousness of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and volition, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, works because it is deeply emotional. Concepts and emotion flawlessly merge in a segment where a gifted youth, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past civilizations to which her instructor replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the classical physics endures beyond her tragically abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was seldom questioned. What was discussed, especially in the early years, were his reservations about the efficacy of art: something he often discussed in interviews. “I used to feel alone,” 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 compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a running commentary on money, marriage, morals, status, the fall of the aristocracy and the rise of business. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a number of works that grapple to significant impact with the violation of civil liberties by oppressive regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly diagnosed mad and locked in a room with an genuine madman who imagines himself in command of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the full LSO on the stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the cruel absurdities of communist repression with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “force is met with irony and inflexibility with a