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Every one of the great playwrights broaden the frontiers of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their own way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure topics – from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the enigma of awareness – and transform them into clever, creative and frequently moving theatrical works. The stage, the actor Olivier noted, is a significant glamoriser of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Initial Discovery

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly thanks to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to give a short talk on two broadcast plays by a then unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer ran up an constantly rising 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 speaking clock. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed exceptionally polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the ways of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by character and plot. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the stillness, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The distinctive blend of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a significant ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles adhered to an absolute, God-given law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the topic of a speech being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the London Library where he was clutching a mound of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly evident. The breakthrough perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to revival. It raises a whole host of questions such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of private derangement and whether concepts such as justice and patriotism exist independent of our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense consciousness of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and free will, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, works because it is deeply moving. Ideas and feeling seamlessly merge in a moment where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past civilizations to which her tutor responds: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the Newtonian universe survives her sadly cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was infrequently challenged. What was contested, notably in the initial period, were his reservations about the effectiveness of drama: something he regularly explored in discussions. “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 housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a ongoing observation on finance, matrimony, ethics, social class, the decline of the nobility and the dominance of business. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a number of works that grapple to significant impact with the abuse of individual freedoms by oppressive governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic wrongly pronounced mad and locked in a cell with an authentic lunatic who believes himself in charge of an symphony. It was startling both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the cruel illogicalities of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with irony and strictness with a