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Every one of the finest playwrights push the boundaries of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their own fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized subjects – from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of the mind – and transform them into witty, creative and often touching dramas. Drama, the actor Olivier remarked, is a great glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Early Introduction

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard early on. That was completely because of Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to give a short talk on two radio plays by a at that time unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer ran up an ever escalating taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was exceptionally courteous. 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 Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances causing our demise. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The typical fusion of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a major moral issue: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether principles obeyed an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the focus of a talk being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised 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 agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the London Library where he was clutching a pile of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the years, the feeling of his plays became ever more visible. The breakthrough perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to reproduction. It poses a multitude of queries such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of individual madness and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense realization of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is deeply touching. Thoughts and emotion seamlessly coincide in a segment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past civilisations to which her tutor answers: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe outlasts her sadly truncated life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was infrequently challenged. What was contested, notably in the initial period, were his skepticism about the efficacy of theatre: something he often explored in discussions. “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 refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a running commentary on wealth, marriage, morals, social class, the decline of the aristocracy and the dominance of business. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a series of works that grapple to great effect with the misuse of civil liberties by dictatorial regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly declared crazy and locked in a room with an real psychiatric patient who believes himself in control of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the cruel illogicalities of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with irony and rigidity with a