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All the great playwrights push the frontiers of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their own fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric subjects – ranging from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the mystery of consciousness – and turn them into clever, creative and frequently emotional theatrical works. The stage, Laurence Olivier once said, is a great glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Initial Encounter

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard early on. That was completely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a short talk on two broadcast plays by a then little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer accumulated an constantly rising taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed exceptionally polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the ways of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances causing our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed 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 silence, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The typical fusion of daring ideas and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a significant ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an unchanging, God-given law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the focus of a talk being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped 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 ex- minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into 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 replied.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly visible. The breakthrough arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It asks a whole host of questions such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of individual madness and whether ideas such as justice and patriotism exist independent of our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense consciousness of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and volition, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is intensely emotional. Thoughts and feeling perfectly come together in a moment where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, laments the loss of past cultures to which her instructor responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the Newton's world survives her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was rarely challenged. What was debated, notably in the initial period, were his skepticism about the power of theatre: something he often talked about in conversations. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a ongoing observation on money, marriage, morals, social class, the fall of the nobility and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a number of works that engage to powerful results with the abuse of individual freedoms by oppressive regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident falsely declared crazy and confined in a cell with an real psychiatric patient who thinks he is in control of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the cruel ridiculousness of communist repression with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with irony and inflexibility with a