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All the great dramatists extend the frontiers of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their own way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure themes – from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the enigma of consciousness – and convert them into clever, inventive and regularly emotional plays. Theatre, the actor Olivier once said, is a great glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Early Introduction

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was completely because of a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to give a brief lecture on two radio plays by a then obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer racked up an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact 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 speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed perfectly courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the nature of our world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances leading to our demise. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The typical blend of daring ideas and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a major ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions followed an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the topic of a lecture being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the London Library where he was gripping a mound of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the feeling of his plays became ever more evident. The breakthrough perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to revival. It poses a whole host of queries such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of individual madness and whether concepts such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened realization of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is intensely moving. Concepts and emotion seamlessly come together in a scene where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past civilizations to which her instructor answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the Newton's world endures beyond her sadly cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was rarely challenged. What was discussed, especially in the early years, were his skepticism about the power of art: something he frequently discussed in conversations. “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 housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a ongoing observation on wealth, wedlock, ethics, class, the fall of the nobility and the rise of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a number of works that deal to powerful results with the abuse of human rights by authoritarian governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly pronounced mad and imprisoned in a cell with an genuine madman who thinks he is in command of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the whole orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard exposing the harsh absurdities of communist repression with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and strictness with a