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Every one of the great playwrights push the boundaries of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their distinct manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure subjects – from chaos theory to ethical thought and the mystery of the mind – and turn them into humorous, creative and often touching dramas. Theatre, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a significant glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Early Introduction

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was completely because of a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a then unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer ran up an ever escalating cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed perfectly gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the nature of our world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances resulting in our end. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the stillness, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic blend of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a major moral issue: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the topic of a speech being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Emotional Breakthrough

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

With time, the feeling of his plays became ever more visible. The key moment arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to restaging. It poses a whole host of questions such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of private derangement and whether concepts such as justice and patriotism exist outside our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute awareness of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, functions because it is profoundly emotional. Concepts and feeling flawlessly merge in a scene where a gifted youth, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past civilisations to which her teacher replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the Newton's world survives her sadly cut short life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was infrequently questioned. What was contested, particularly in the initial period, were his reservations about the effectiveness of drama: something he often explored in interviews. “I used to feel alone,” 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 allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a running commentary on finance, marriage, ethics, class, the decline of the aristocracy and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a collection of works that grapple to powerful results with the misuse of civil liberties by oppressive systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly declared insane and confined in a chamber with an genuine lunatic who imagines himself in charge of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the entire LSO on stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the brutal ridiculousness of communist repression with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “force is met with wit and strictness with a