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Every one of the finest playwrights broaden the frontiers of theatre. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their unique way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric topics – ranging from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the enigma of the mind – and convert them into clever, imaginative and frequently touching dramas. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a powerful glamorizer of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Initial Discovery

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard early on. That was completely due to Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to give a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a then little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer racked up an constantly rising taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was perfectly polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the nature of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we finally 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 crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances causing our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the silence, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive fusion of daring ideas and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a significant moral issue: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles followed an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the focus of a speech being developed 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 fractured marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was clutching a mound of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became ever more apparent. The turning point arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It poses a whole host of questions such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of individual madness and whether ideas such as justice and patriotism exist beyond our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened awareness of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and volition, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is intensely emotional. Thoughts and feeling perfectly come together in a moment where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past cultures to which her teacher responds: “Scientific insights caught sight of and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the classical physics survives her sadly abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was rarely challenged. What was contested, notably in the early years, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of theatre: something he regularly explored in conversations. “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 social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a running commentary on money, marriage, values, class, the weakening of the nobility and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a collection of works that grapple to powerful results with the violation of civil liberties by oppressive systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic incorrectly pronounced mad and imprisoned in a room with an authentic lunatic who believes himself in control of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the entire orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the cruel illogicalities of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and strictness with a