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All the great playwrights broaden the frontiers of theatre. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their own manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized themes – from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the puzzle of the mind – and turn them into witty, creative and often touching theatrical works. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a great glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Early Encounter

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard early on. That was completely because of a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a short talk on two audio dramas by a at that time little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer ran up an constantly rising taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained perfectly polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the workings of our world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the stillness, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The distinctive fusion of conceptual boldness and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a significant moral issue: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether principles adhered to an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the topic of a speech being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about sophisticated 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 clutching a pile of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became ever more visible. The turning point likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to revival. It poses a multitude of issues such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of personal instability and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist beyond our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute realization of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly emotional. Thoughts and emotion flawlessly merge in a scene where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past civilisations to which her tutor replies: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the classical physics endures beyond her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was seldom questioned. What was discussed, notably in the early years, 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 jerk if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a ongoing observation on finance, matrimony, ethics, status, the decline of the nobility and the rise of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a collection of works that deal to powerful results with the abuse of human rights by authoritarian systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident falsely declared crazy and locked in a chamber with an authentic lunatic who believes himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the whole orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the harsh absurdities of communist repression with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with wit and strictness with a