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Every one of the outstanding playwrights push the frontiers of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their own way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric topics – from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of awareness – and transform them into clever, creative and often touching theatrical works. The stage, the actor Olivier noted, is a significant glamoriser of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Encounter

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard early on. That was wholly because of a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he asked me to give a brief lecture on two radio plays by a then little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer racked up an ever escalating cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the voice of the time. I was impressed by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained exceptionally polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the ways of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by character and plot. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances causing our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The typical blend of daring ideas and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a big moral issue: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles followed an absolute, God-given law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the topic of a lecture being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the anguish of a fractured marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance 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 replied.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly evident. The key moment likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to revival. It poses a plethora of queries such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of individual madness and whether notions such as justice and patriotism exist independent of our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened realization of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and free will, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is deeply moving. Ideas and emotion perfectly merge in a segment where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past cultures to which her tutor responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the Newton's world survives her tragically abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was infrequently doubted. What was debated, notably in the early years, were his reservations about the effectiveness of drama: something he frequently talked about in interviews. “I used to feel out on a limb,” 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 allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a ongoing observation on wealth, matrimony, ethics, class, the decline of the aristocracy and the rise of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a series of works that engage to powerful results with the misuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident incorrectly pronounced insane and locked in a chamber with an genuine psychiatric patient who imagines himself in control of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the whole orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the brutal absurdities of communist repression with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a