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All the finest playwrights push the frontiers of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their unique way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized themes – ranging from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the mystery of consciousness – and transform them into witty, inventive and regularly emotional theatrical works. The stage, Laurence Olivier noted, is a powerful glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Encounter

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely because of a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to present a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a then unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer racked up an constantly rising taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained impeccably gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the workings of our world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances causing our extinction. 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 beating back the quiet, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic blend of conceptual boldness and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a major moral issue: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles followed an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the subject of a speech being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the a library in London where he was clutching a mound of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became ever more visible. The key moment perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to reproduction. It poses a whole host of queries such as whether any public commitment is the result of individual madness and whether ideas such as justice and patriotism exist independent of our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense awareness of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, works because it is profoundly moving. Ideas and feeling flawlessly come together in a moment where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past civilisations to which her teacher replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the Newton's world outlasts her unfortunately truncated life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was infrequently doubted. What was discussed, especially in the initial period, were his doubts about the effectiveness of drama: something he frequently discussed in conversations. “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 housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a continuous critique on money, wedlock, ethics, social class, the fall of the upper class and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a number of works that engage to significant impact with the violation of civil liberties by oppressive governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident wrongly diagnosed crazy and imprisoned in a cell with an genuine psychiatric patient who imagines himself in command of an symphony. It was startling both to see the whole LSO on the stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the cruel illogicalities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “force is met with wit and strictness with a