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All the outstanding playwrights push the frontiers of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their distinct fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized themes – from chaos theory to ethical thought and the mystery of awareness – and turn them into clever, imaginative and often moving dramas. Theatre, the actor Olivier noted, is a powerful glamoriser of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Initial Encounter

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard early on. That was entirely because of a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to present a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a at that time unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer accumulated an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was perfectly gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the workings of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by character and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances leading to our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed 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, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The typical blend of daring ideas and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a significant philosophical question: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether principles adhered to an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the subject of a speech 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 suffering of a failing marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the London Library where he was clutching a mound of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With time, the emotional content of his plays became more and more visible. The breakthrough perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to revival. It poses a whole host of issues such as whether any social obligation is the result of private derangement and whether concepts such as fairness and national pride exist beyond our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute awareness of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and choice, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, works because it is intensely emotional. Thoughts and sentiment flawlessly coincide in a scene where a gifted youth, Thomasina, laments the demise of past civilizations to which her tutor answers: “Scientific insights glimpsed and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the classical physics outlasts her sadly abbreviated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was infrequently doubted. What was debated, especially in the beginning, were his skepticism about the efficacy of theatre: something he regularly discussed in discussions. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a running commentary on wealth, marriage, morals, social class, the weakening of the aristocracy and the dominance of business. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a number of works that grapple to significant impact with the abuse of individual freedoms by oppressive regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident falsely diagnosed insane and locked in a cell with an genuine lunatic who thinks he is in command of an symphony. It was startling both to see the full LSO on the stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the harsh ridiculousness of communist repression with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with wit and strictness with a