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All the great playwrights push the boundaries of theatre. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their distinct manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized themes – from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the enigma of the mind – and transform them into clever, creative and frequently touching theatrical works. The stage, the actor Olivier once said, is a significant glamorizer of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Initial Encounter

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard early on. That was wholly thanks to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to give a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a back then little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer ran up an constantly rising taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained exceptionally courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the ways of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances causing our demise. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the stillness, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive fusion of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a significant ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions followed an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the focus of a lecture being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the London Library where he was gripping 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 apparent. The turning point perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to revival. It raises a multitude of questions such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of individual madness 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 intense consciousness of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and volition, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly touching. Concepts and feeling flawlessly coincide in a scene where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past civilizations to which her instructor replies: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newton's world outlasts her tragically truncated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was infrequently questioned. What was contested, especially in the initial period, were his reservations about the effectiveness of theatre: something he often explored in interviews. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a ongoing observation on money, marriage, morals, status, the weakening of the nobility and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a collection of works that grapple to great effect with the violation of human rights by oppressive systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist falsely diagnosed mad and imprisoned in a cell with an genuine lunatic who believes himself in control of an symphony. It was startling both to see the whole LSO on stage and to see Stoppard revealing the brutal ridiculousness of communist repression with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with irony and rigidity with a