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Every one of the finest playwrights broaden the frontiers of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their distinct way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure themes – ranging from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the mystery of consciousness – and convert them into humorous, imaginative and often moving dramas. Drama, the actor Olivier remarked, is a powerful glamoriser of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Early Introduction

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely thanks to Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to give a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a then obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer accumulated an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed exceptionally gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the nature of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language 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 tragic.”

The characteristic fusion of intellectual audacity and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a big moral issue: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the subject of a talk being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the entrance of the London Library where he was clutching a stack of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With time, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly apparent. The turning point likely came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to revival. It asks a plethora of questions such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of individual madness and whether notions such as justice and patriotism exist independent of our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense realization of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and volition, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly touching. Concepts and sentiment seamlessly coincide in a scene where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past civilisations to which her instructor answers: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newton's world outlasts her sadly cut short life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was rarely doubted. What was debated, notably in the beginning, were his reservations about the effectiveness of art: something he regularly discussed 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 the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a running commentary on finance, wedlock, morals, social class, the weakening of the nobility and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a series of works that grapple to powerful results with the misuse of human rights by authoritarian regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident wrongly diagnosed crazy and confined in a cell with an real madman who thinks he is in charge of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the full orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard revealing the cruel absurdities of communist repression with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with irony and rigidity with a