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Every one of the great playwrights broaden the boundaries of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their distinct way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure topics – from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the enigma of consciousness – and turn them into witty, inventive and regularly touching dramas. Drama, the actor Olivier remarked, is a great glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Initial Introduction

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely because of a man named Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he invited me to give a mini-speech on two radio plays by a then unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer ran up an constantly rising cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed perfectly gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the ways of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances causing our end. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the stillness, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The distinctive fusion of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a major moral issue: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether principles obeyed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the focus of a talk being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation 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 carefully researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was clutching a stack of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became ever more evident. The turning point perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to revival. It raises a whole host of queries such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of individual madness and whether concepts such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense consciousness of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and choice, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, works because it is intensely moving. Concepts and emotion flawlessly come together in a scene where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, laments the loss of past cultures to which her instructor answers: “Scientific insights caught sight of and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the Newton's world survives her tragically truncated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was seldom questioned. What was contested, particularly in the initial period, were his reservations about the power of art: something he often explored in interviews. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a running commentary on money, marriage, ethics, class, the fall of the nobility and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a collection of works that grapple to great effect with the abuse of human rights by dictatorial regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic incorrectly pronounced mad and imprisoned in a chamber with an real lunatic who imagines himself in charge of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the whole LSO on the stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the cruel illogicalities of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and strictness with a