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Every one of the great playwrights push the boundaries of theatre. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their own fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized subjects – ranging from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the enigma of consciousness – and transform them into humorous, inventive and regularly touching theatrical works. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a great glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Encounter

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a at that time obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer accumulated an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was impeccably gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the workings of our world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven 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 in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances causing our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the silence, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic blend of daring ideas and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a significant moral issue: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an unchanging, God-given law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the focus of a speech being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the anguish of a fractured marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs 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 time, the sentiment of his plays became more and more apparent. The breakthrough likely came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to revival. It poses a plethora of queries such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of personal instability and whether ideas such as fairness and national pride exist beyond our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense awareness of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and free will, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, works because it is intensely emotional. Concepts and feeling flawlessly come together in a segment where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, laments the loss of past civilisations to which her teacher answers: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the Newtonian universe outlasts her sadly cut short life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was seldom questioned. What was debated, particularly in the early years, were his reservations about the power of drama: 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 shit if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a continuous critique on money, marriage, morals, social class, the decline of the nobility and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a number of works that engage to great effect with the abuse of civil liberties by dictatorial governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist falsely pronounced insane and confined in a room with an real psychiatric patient who imagines himself in control of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the full LSO on stage and to see Stoppard exposing the harsh ridiculousness of communist repression with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a