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All the outstanding playwrights push the frontiers of drama. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their distinct manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized topics – from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the mystery of awareness – and transform them into witty, inventive and often touching theatrical works. The stage, the actor Olivier noted, is a significant glamoriser of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Early Introduction

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely thanks to Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a back then obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer ran up an ever escalating taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed impeccably courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the nature of our world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the silence, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive blend of conceptual boldness and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, 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 universal, heaven-sent law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the topic of a lecture being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the a library in London where he was clutching a stack of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With time, the feeling of his plays became more and more visible. The turning point perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to reproduction. It poses a multitude of queries such as whether any civic duty is the result of personal instability and whether concepts such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute awareness of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and free will, classicism and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly moving. Concepts and sentiment perfectly come together in a scene where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, laments the demise of past cultures to which her instructor replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the classical physics endures beyond her tragically abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was seldom doubted. What was debated, especially in the beginning, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of art: something he regularly explored in interviews. “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 the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a ongoing observation on wealth, marriage, ethics, class, the weakening of the nobility and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a collection of works that grapple to significant impact with the abuse of human rights by authoritarian governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic incorrectly diagnosed insane and confined in a room with an genuine madman who imagines himself in command of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the full orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard revealing the cruel absurdities of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a