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Every one of the finest dramatists push the frontiers of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their distinct fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized subjects – ranging from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of awareness – and convert them into humorous, inventive and often touching theatrical works. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a powerful glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Early Encounter

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely because of Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to present a short talk on two broadcast plays by a then obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer ran up an constantly rising cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It says much 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 today adore – he was impeccably polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the ways of our world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the quiet, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic combination of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a big ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an absolute, God-given law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the topic of a talk being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the London Library where he was gripping a mound of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the feeling of his plays became ever more apparent. The turning point perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to restaging. It poses a multitude of questions such as whether any social obligation is the result of private derangement and whether concepts such as fairness and patriotism exist beyond our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute realization of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and choice, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is profoundly emotional. Thoughts and feeling seamlessly merge in a scene where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past civilisations to which her teacher responds: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the classical physics endures beyond her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was seldom questioned. What was contested, particularly in the early years, were his reservations about the efficacy of theatre: something he regularly talked about 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 Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no hesitation 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 entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a continuous critique on finance, marriage, values, class, the decline of the upper class and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a series of works that grapple to significant impact with the violation of human rights by oppressive governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic wrongly declared crazy and confined in a room with an real psychiatric patient who believes himself in control of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the full LSO on stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the cruel illogicalities of communist repression with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with irony and rigidity with a