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Every one of the great playwrights extend the frontiers of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their unique manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure themes – from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the puzzle of consciousness – and turn them into clever, inventive and regularly moving dramas. The stage, the actor Olivier noted, is a powerful glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Early Encounter

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard early on. That was wholly because of a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a short talk on two radio plays by a back then unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer racked up an ever escalating taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed perfectly courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the nature of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances causing our end. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the silence, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic fusion of conceptual boldness and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a significant ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules followed an universal, God-given law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the subject of a talk being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the London Library where he was gripping a pile of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly visible. The breakthrough arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to restaging. It poses a multitude of queries such as whether any social obligation is the result of individual madness and whether concepts such as fairness and patriotism exist beyond our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute awareness of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and free will, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly emotional. Ideas and sentiment flawlessly come together in a scene where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past cultures to which her instructor replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her unfortunately truncated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was infrequently challenged. What was discussed, particularly in the initial period, were his reservations about the effectiveness of theatre: something he often explored in discussions. “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 the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a continuous critique on finance, matrimony, ethics, class, the fall of the nobility and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a number of works that engage to powerful results with the violation of individual freedoms by authoritarian governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident wrongly pronounced insane and locked in a cell with an real psychiatric patient who believes himself in control of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the harsh ridiculousness of communist repression with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a