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Every one of the finest playwrights extend the frontiers of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their distinct way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure themes – from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the puzzle of the mind – and transform them into clever, creative and frequently touching plays. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a significant embellisher of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Initial Introduction

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard early on. That was wholly because of Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a mini-speech on two radio plays by a then obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer ran up an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was exceptionally polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the nature of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by character and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances resulting in our end. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the stillness, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic fusion of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a big philosophical question: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles followed an universal, God-given law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the focus of a lecture being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

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 carefully studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the a library in London where he was holding a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly evident. The key moment likely came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to revival. It raises a multitude of queries such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of personal instability and whether concepts such as justice and national pride exist beyond our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened realization of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and choice, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is deeply moving. Ideas and feeling perfectly merge in a scene where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, laments the demise of past civilizations to which her tutor responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newton's world endures beyond her unfortunately cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was rarely doubted. What was debated, notably in the initial period, were his doubts about the power of art: something he regularly explored in conversations. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a ongoing observation on finance, marriage, ethics, status, the decline of the upper class and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a series of works that engage to powerful results with the violation of civil liberties by authoritarian systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident falsely declared mad and confined in a cell with an genuine psychiatric patient who imagines himself in command of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard exposing the cruel absurdities of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with wit and rigidity with a