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All the great playwrights broaden the frontiers of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their distinct way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized topics – ranging from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the puzzle of consciousness – and turn them into clever, inventive and regularly touching theatrical works. The stage, the actor Olivier once said, is a great glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Discovery

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly thanks to Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to give a short talk on two audio dramas by a at that time obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer ran up an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed exceptionally gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the nature of our world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the stillness, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive combination of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a major philosophical question: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the focus of a talk being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was holding a stack of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became more and more apparent. The breakthrough arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to revival. It poses a whole host of queries such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of individual madness and whether concepts such as fairness and national pride exist outside our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute awareness of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, works because it is deeply emotional. Concepts and emotion flawlessly merge in a segment where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past civilizations to which her teacher answers: “Scientific insights glimpsed and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the Newton's world survives her unfortunately cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was seldom doubted. What was contested, notably in the initial period, were his doubts about the efficacy of theatre: something he regularly talked about in interviews. “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 Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a running commentary on wealth, marriage, ethics, social class, the decline of the upper class and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a collection of works that engage to great effect with the violation of human rights by oppressive governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident incorrectly pronounced mad and confined in a cell with an real madman who believes himself in charge of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the entire orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the harsh absurdities of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a