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All the finest dramatists push the frontiers of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their distinct fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric subjects – ranging from chaos theory to ethical thought and the enigma of awareness – and turn them into witty, creative and regularly touching theatrical works. Theatre, the actor Olivier once said, is a significant glamoriser of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Encounter

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was completely because of a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to present a brief lecture on two radio plays by a back then little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer accumulated an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the ingenuity 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 Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was impeccably polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the nature of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the quiet, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive blend of daring ideas and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a significant moral issue: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an universal, God-given law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the focus of a lecture being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was clutching a pile of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly apparent. The turning point arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to reproduction. It raises a whole host of issues such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of personal instability and whether concepts such as justice and national pride exist independent of our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute consciousness of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is intensely moving. Thoughts and emotion perfectly merge in a scene where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past cultures to which her teacher responds: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her unfortunately truncated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was infrequently doubted. What was discussed, especially in the early years, were his reservations about the effectiveness of drama: 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 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 meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a ongoing observation on finance, matrimony, morals, class, the fall of the nobility and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a series of works that deal to powerful results with the violation of individual freedoms by authoritarian systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident falsely declared mad and locked in a chamber with an authentic madman who imagines himself in command of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the harsh ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a