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All the great playwrights push the frontiers of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their unique manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure subjects – from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the mystery of consciousness – and turn them into witty, creative and frequently emotional theatrical works. The stage, Laurence Olivier noted, is a great glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Early Encounter

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard early on. That was entirely due to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to present a short talk on two audio dramas by a back then unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer racked up an ever escalating cab fare. And in If You’re 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 captivated by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed impeccably polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the ways of our world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was always 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 praised for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The typical combination of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a big moral issue: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the topic of a talk being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was clutching a pile of books that reached 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 increasingly apparent. The breakthrough perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to reproduction. It poses a whole host of queries such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of individual madness and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and choice, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is intensely emotional. Concepts and emotion seamlessly coincide in a moment where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past cultures to which her teacher responds: “Scientific insights glimpsed and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the Newtonian universe outlasts her sadly truncated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was seldom doubted. What was discussed, especially in the early years, were his doubts about the power of drama: something he often discussed in discussions. “I used to feel isolated,” 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 hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a continuous critique on money, matrimony, morals, social class, the weakening of the nobility and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a series of works that deal to powerful results with the abuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic incorrectly declared crazy and confined in a chamber with an authentic madman who imagines himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the full LSO on the stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the cruel illogicalities of communist repression with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with irony and rigidity with a