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Every one of the outstanding playwrights broaden the limits of theatre. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their own fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure themes – from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the enigma of awareness – and convert them into clever, inventive and regularly emotional dramas. The stage, the actor Olivier remarked, is a powerful embellisher of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Introduction

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard early on. That was wholly due to Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to give a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a then little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer racked up an skyrocketing cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the voice of the time. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained exceptionally gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the workings of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by character and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances causing our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic combination of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a significant ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles adhered to an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the focus of a lecture being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was holding a mound of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With time, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly evident. The key moment perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to revival. It asks a multitude of queries such as whether any social obligation is the result of personal instability and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened consciousness of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and free will, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a host of other things, works because it is deeply touching. Concepts and feeling seamlessly coincide in a scene where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past civilisations to which her teacher replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the Newton's world outlasts her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was infrequently questioned. What was discussed, notably in the early years, were his doubts about the efficacy of drama: something he frequently discussed in conversations. “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 social housing. Now I have no qualms 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 provides a running commentary on money, wedlock, values, status, the decline of the upper class and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a number of works that deal to significant impact with the misuse of human rights by authoritarian regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic falsely pronounced crazy and confined in a room with an genuine psychiatric patient who imagines himself in command of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the harsh illogicalities of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with irony and inflexibility with a