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All the outstanding 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 subjects – from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the mystery of awareness – and convert them into clever, imaginative and often emotional theatrical works. Drama, Laurence Olivier noted, is a great glamoriser of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Initial Encounter

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard early on. That was wholly due to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a brief lecture on two radio plays by a then unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer accumulated an skyrocketing cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was impeccably gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the workings of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by character and plot. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its brilliance in constructing 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 resulting in our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the stillness, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The characteristic blend of intellectual audacity and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a significant moral issue: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions followed an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the topic of a talk being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the London Library where he was clutching a stack of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became more and more evident. The breakthrough perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to reproduction. It poses a multitude of issues such as whether any public commitment is the result of personal instability and whether notions such as justice and patriotism exist independent of our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened awareness of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, functions because it is profoundly moving. Ideas and sentiment perfectly merge in a segment where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past cultures to which her teacher responds: “Scientific insights caught sight of and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe outlasts her sadly truncated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was rarely questioned. What was debated, particularly in the early years, were his reservations about the effectiveness of theatre: something he regularly 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 housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a running commentary on finance, matrimony, values, status, the fall of the aristocracy and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a collection of works that deal to significant impact with the abuse of civil liberties by dictatorial regimes. One of the most stunning 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 genuine psychiatric patient who believes himself in command of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the whole LSO on stage and to see Stoppard revealing the cruel ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a