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Every one of the great playwrights extend the boundaries of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their distinct way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure themes – ranging from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the enigma of the mind – and convert them into clever, inventive and often emotional dramas. The stage, the actor Olivier remarked, is a great glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Introduction

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely due to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to give a short talk on two broadcast plays by a at that time unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer accumulated an constantly rising taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the ingenuity 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 gone on television in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained impeccably gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the workings of the media.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances leading to our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the quiet, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive blend of conceptual boldness and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a big philosophical question: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the topic of a talk being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was gripping a mound of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became increasingly evident. The turning point perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to restaging. It asks a plethora of queries such as whether any social obligation is the result of private derangement and whether concepts such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense realization of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and volition, classicism and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly moving. Thoughts and emotion seamlessly coincide in a moment where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past cultures to which her tutor responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the Newton's world survives her tragically abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was seldom questioned. What was debated, especially in the beginning, were his doubts about the efficacy of art: something he frequently discussed in discussions. “I used to feel isolated,” 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 meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a ongoing observation on finance, wedlock, morals, social class, the weakening of the upper class and the rise of business. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a collection of works that deal to significant impact with the abuse of human rights by oppressive regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly pronounced mad and locked in a room with an genuine psychiatric patient who believes himself in control of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the entire LSO on the stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the cruel ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “force is met with irony and inflexibility with a