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All the great playwrights extend the frontiers of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their unique manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized themes – from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the enigma of awareness – and turn them into witty, imaginative and often touching theatrical works. The stage, Laurence Olivier noted, is a powerful glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Initial Discovery

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard early on. That was wholly because of Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to give a brief lecture on two radio plays by a back then unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer ran up an skyrocketing cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained exceptionally gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the workings of our world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances leading to our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the stillness, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The typical fusion of daring ideas and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a big moral issue: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions followed an absolute, God-given law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the subject of a lecture being prepared 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 pain of a failing marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the London Library where he was clutching a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the years, the feeling of his plays became ever more apparent. The turning point arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to restaging. It poses a multitude of queries such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of personal instability and whether concepts such as justice and national pride exist outside our understanding of them. But underlying 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 addresses fatalism and volition, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is intensely moving. Thoughts and feeling flawlessly merge in a scene where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past civilisations to which her tutor answers: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newtonian universe outlasts her unfortunately cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was rarely doubted. What was debated, notably in the initial period, were his reservations about the effectiveness of art: something he frequently discussed 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 the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a running commentary on money, matrimony, morals, social class, the decline of the nobility and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a number of works that deal to powerful results with the violation of human rights by oppressive regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident incorrectly diagnosed insane and locked in a chamber with an real madman who imagines himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the full LSO on the stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the brutal absurdities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with irony and inflexibility with a