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Every one of the finest dramatists broaden the boundaries of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their own fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric themes – from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the enigma of consciousness – and turn them into clever, imaginative and regularly touching theatrical works. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a great glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Early Introduction

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard early on. That was entirely because of Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to give a brief lecture on two radio plays by a then obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer accumulated an constantly rising cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained impeccably gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the ways of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by individuals and narrative. 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 emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the silence, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The typical blend of daring ideas and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a significant ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an universal, God-given law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the topic of a speech being developed by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was gripping a pile of books that rose 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 more and more apparent. The breakthrough perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to restaging. It raises a plethora of issues such as whether any public commitment is the result of individual madness and whether concepts such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute realization of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and volition, classicism and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, works because it is intensely touching. Concepts and feeling seamlessly coincide in a moment where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past civilizations to which her teacher answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the Newton's world outlasts her unfortunately truncated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was rarely doubted. What was contested, particularly in the beginning, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of drama: something he often discussed in conversations. “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 social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a running commentary on finance, wedlock, morals, social class, the weakening of the upper class and the dominance of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a collection of works that engage to great effect with the misuse of human rights by oppressive systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident wrongly diagnosed mad and locked in a cell with an authentic lunatic who believes himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the whole LSO on stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the brutal ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a