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All the outstanding dramatists push the frontiers of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their own way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized topics – ranging from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the enigma of the mind – and convert them into clever, imaginative and frequently moving dramas. The stage, the actor Olivier remarked, is a great glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Initial Encounter

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely due to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to give a brief lecture on two radio plays by a back then obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer accumulated an skyrocketing cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained impeccably courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the nature of the media.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by character and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we eventually 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 casualties of chance circumstances causing our extinction. 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 word is all. The word is pushing back the silence, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The typical combination of intellectual audacity and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a major moral issue: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether principles adhered to an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the topic of a talk being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a former 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 viewers were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the steps 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 responded.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became more and more visible. The turning point likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It poses a plethora of issues such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of personal instability and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist beyond our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute consciousness of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and volition, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, functions because it is profoundly touching. Concepts and sentiment perfectly coincide in a moment where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past civilisations to which her teacher answers: “Scientific insights glimpsed and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newtonian universe survives her sadly cut short life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was rarely challenged. What was discussed, particularly in the beginning, were his skepticism about the efficacy of drama: something he often explored in conversations. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a ongoing observation on finance, wedlock, values, social class, the weakening of the nobility and the dominance of business. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a number of works that deal to significant impact with the abuse of human rights by authoritarian governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic falsely diagnosed crazy and confined in a chamber with an genuine lunatic who imagines himself in charge of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the entire LSO on stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the harsh ridiculousness of communist repression with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with wit and rigidity with a