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Every one of the great dramatists extend the frontiers of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their own manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric themes – ranging from chaos theory to ethical thought and the puzzle of consciousness – and turn them into witty, creative and often touching plays. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a significant embellisher of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Early Encounter

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely thanks to Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to present a short talk on two broadcast plays by a at that time unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer ran up an ever escalating taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained perfectly gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the workings of the media.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances causing our end. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive blend of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a big philosophical question: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules followed an absolute, God-given law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the subject of a lecture being developed by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the London Library where he was holding a mound of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With time, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly visible. The breakthrough likely came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to revival. It asks a multitude of queries such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of personal instability and whether notions such as justice and patriotism exist independent of our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense realization of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and choice, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a host of other things, functions because it is intensely moving. Ideas and emotion perfectly merge in a scene where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past civilisations to which her teacher answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newton's world survives her unfortunately truncated life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was rarely doubted. What was discussed, particularly in the beginning, were his doubts about the efficacy of drama: something he often discussed in interviews. “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 Vietnam or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a running commentary on finance, marriage, ethics, class, the fall of the aristocracy and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a series of works that grapple to powerful results with the violation of individual freedoms by authoritarian governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic wrongly pronounced crazy and confined in a room with an genuine lunatic who believes himself in command of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the brutal illogicalities of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a