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Every one of the outstanding playwrights extend the boundaries of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their unique way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure subjects – ranging from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the puzzle of awareness – and turn them into witty, imaginative and regularly moving theatrical works. The stage, Laurence Olivier noted, is a great embellisher of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Discovery

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard early on. That was entirely due to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to present a mini-speech on two radio plays by a then unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer ran up an ever escalating cab fare. And in 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 had the chance to meet their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed impeccably courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the workings of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances causing our demise. 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 language is all. The word is resisting the silence, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic combination of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a significant ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether principles adhered to an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the subject of a lecture being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was gripping a mound of books that came up 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 visible. The key moment perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to reproduction. It raises a whole host of questions such as whether any social obligation is the result of individual madness and whether concepts such as justice and national pride exist independent of our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute realization of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and free will, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, functions because it is profoundly moving. Concepts and sentiment flawlessly coincide in a segment where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past civilisations to which her tutor responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the classical physics outlasts her sadly cut short life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was rarely questioned. What was debated, especially in the initial period, were his doubts about the effectiveness of theatre: something he regularly 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 the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a continuous critique on wealth, wedlock, values, class, the weakening of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a series of works that deal to great effect with the misuse of civil liberties by oppressive systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic falsely declared mad and locked in a room with an real madman who believes himself in control of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the entire orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the harsh ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and strictness with a