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All the great playwrights extend the boundaries of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their own manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure themes – from chaos theory to ethical thought and the mystery of awareness – and transform them into clever, inventive and often emotional dramas. Theatre, Laurence Olivier noted, is a significant embellisher of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Introduction

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard early on. That was completely due to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to present a short talk on two radio plays by a back then unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer racked up an ever escalating taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained exceptionally gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the nature of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by character and plot. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the silence, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic blend of daring ideas and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a big ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether principles adhered to an universal, God-given law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the subject of a talk 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 suffering of a fractured marriage and the risks 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 achievement – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was gripping a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the years, the feeling of his plays became more and more visible. The breakthrough arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to restaging. It raises a whole host of queries such as whether any public commitment is the result of private derangement and whether ideas such as fairness and national pride exist outside our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute realization of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and free will, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, works because it is intensely emotional. Ideas and emotion flawlessly come together in a scene where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past civilisations to which her tutor responds: “Scientific insights glimpsed and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the classical physics outlasts her sadly truncated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was seldom doubted. What was contested, particularly in the early years, were his doubts about the power of theatre: something he often talked about in conversations. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no qualms 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 Wilde’s play provides a ongoing observation on wealth, marriage, morals, class, the decline of the nobility and the dominance of business. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a series of works that engage to powerful results with the misuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident falsely declared mad and locked in a room with an authentic madman who thinks he is in control of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the brutal illogicalities of communist repression with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with irony and inflexibility with a