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Every one of the great playwrights push the frontiers of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their unique manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric themes – from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the mystery of consciousness – and transform them into clever, imaginative and frequently touching theatrical works. The stage, Laurence Olivier noted, is a great glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Early Introduction

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely because of Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to present a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a at that time unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer racked up an constantly rising cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained perfectly polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the ways of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances causing our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the silence, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The typical fusion of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a significant ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an unchanging, God-given law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the topic of a talk being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the a library in London where he was holding 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 emotional content of his plays became increasingly evident. The key moment arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to restaging. It poses a whole host of queries such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of personal instability and whether notions such as justice and national pride exist outside our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense consciousness of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and volition, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a host of other things, functions because it is deeply moving. Thoughts and feeling perfectly merge in a scene where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past civilisations to which her instructor responds: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the Newton's world survives her tragically cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was seldom doubted. What was debated, notably in the early years, were his doubts about the power of art: something he often explored in conversations. “I used to feel isolated,” 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 compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a running commentary on money, marriage, ethics, status, the decline of the aristocracy and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a number of works that engage to powerful results with the abuse of civil liberties by oppressive regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic incorrectly pronounced mad and confined in a cell with an real psychiatric patient who thinks he is in charge of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the harsh absurdities of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with wit and rigidity with a