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All the finest playwrights push the frontiers of theatre. Beckett and Pinter did it in their own way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric themes – ranging from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the enigma of consciousness – and convert them into witty, imaginative and frequently moving theatrical works. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a powerful glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Introduction

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely due to Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a short talk on two audio dramas by a then obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer accumulated an constantly rising taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed perfectly polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the nature of our world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances leading to our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive fusion of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a big ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules followed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the topic of a lecture being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Revelation

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

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became more and more apparent. The breakthrough arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It poses a plethora of questions such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of personal instability and whether notions such as justice and patriotism exist outside our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense realization of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is intensely moving. Thoughts and emotion perfectly come together in a moment where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, laments the demise of past cultures to which her teacher replies: “Scientific insights glimpsed and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newtonian universe outlasts her sadly truncated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was seldom doubted. What was debated, especially in the beginning, were his doubts about the effectiveness of drama: something he frequently explored in conversations. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a continuous critique on wealth, wedlock, morals, class, the weakening of the aristocracy and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a number of works that grapple to great effect with the misuse of civil liberties by oppressive systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist falsely declared insane and confined in a cell with an genuine psychiatric patient who believes himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the full LSO on the stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the cruel illogicalities of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with wit and rigidity with a