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Every one of the finest playwrights extend the frontiers of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their own way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized subjects – from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the puzzle of consciousness – and convert them into clever, creative and regularly emotional plays. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a significant glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Discovery

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a then unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer ran up an ever escalating cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed exceptionally courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the nature of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances leading to our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The typical combination of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a major philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions followed an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the focus of a lecture 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 suffering of a failing marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was clutching a mound of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With time, the emotional content of his plays became ever more apparent. The breakthrough perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to revival. It raises a plethora of issues such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of individual madness and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute awareness of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and volition, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, functions because it is deeply emotional. Ideas and sentiment flawlessly come together in a scene where a gifted youth, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past civilizations to which her teacher answers: “Scientific insights glimpsed and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newton's world outlasts her tragically cut short life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was seldom questioned. What was contested, especially in the early years, were his reservations about the efficacy of art: something he regularly explored in discussions. “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 Vietnam or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a ongoing observation on wealth, marriage, morals, social class, the decline of the aristocracy and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a collection of works that grapple to great effect with the violation of human rights by oppressive regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly pronounced mad and confined in a chamber with an authentic lunatic who believes himself in control of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the brutal illogicalities of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with wit and strictness with a