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All the outstanding playwrights broaden the frontiers of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their own way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric themes – ranging from chaos theory to ethical thought and the enigma of the mind – and turn them into clever, inventive and regularly emotional theatrical works. Theatre, the actor Olivier remarked, is a powerful embellisher of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Initial Encounter

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly because of Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a short talk on two broadcast plays by a at that time obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer racked up an constantly rising cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed exceptionally gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the workings of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the silence, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive blend of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a significant ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether principles obeyed an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the topic of a talk being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the entrance of the London Library where he was holding a mound of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became increasingly apparent. The breakthrough perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to restaging. It poses a whole host of issues such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of private derangement and whether concepts such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense realization of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and volition, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly emotional. Concepts and emotion flawlessly coincide in a moment where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, laments the demise of past civilizations to which her tutor responds: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the classical physics outlasts her sadly truncated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was seldom challenged. What was discussed, especially in the early years, were his reservations about the effectiveness of drama: something he frequently talked about in conversations. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person 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], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a ongoing observation on finance, matrimony, values, class, the decline of the nobility and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a number of works that grapple to powerful results with the violation of civil liberties by oppressive systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic falsely diagnosed mad and confined in a cell with an real psychiatric patient who imagines himself in command of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard exposing the cruel illogicalities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a