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Every one of the great playwrights push the frontiers of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their own fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric themes – from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the puzzle of the mind – and transform them into humorous, inventive and often touching dramas. Drama, Laurence Olivier once said, is a powerful glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Introduction

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely due to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a back then unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer accumulated an ever escalating cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed impeccably courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the workings of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances leading to our end. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to 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 moving and even tragic.”

The characteristic fusion of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a big philosophical question: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the topic of a lecture being written 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 failing marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was gripping a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With time, the feeling of his plays became increasingly apparent. The turning point arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It asks a whole host of queries such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of individual madness and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist beyond our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened consciousness of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and volition, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a host of other things, functions because it is profoundly touching. Ideas and sentiment flawlessly merge in a moment where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past civilisations to which her teacher responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the Newton's world survives her sadly truncated life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was seldom doubted. What was discussed, especially in the beginning, were his skepticism about the power of art: something he frequently explored in discussions. “I used to feel out on a limb,” 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 hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The 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 ongoing observation on finance, wedlock, morals, status, the fall of the upper class and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a series of works that grapple to great effect with the abuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident falsely declared mad and confined in a cell with an authentic psychiatric patient who thinks he is in control of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the cruel absurdities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a