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All the great playwrights push the frontiers of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their own manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric themes – ranging from chaos theory to ethical thought and the puzzle of the mind – and turn them into witty, creative and frequently emotional plays. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a powerful glamorizer of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Initial Encounter

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly thanks to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to give a brief lecture on two radio plays by a then obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer racked up an ever escalating taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was impeccably gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the workings of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by character and plot. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances leading to our end. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the stillness, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The distinctive blend of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a significant ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether principles obeyed an absolute, God-given law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the subject of a lecture being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the a library in London where he was gripping a stack of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became ever 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 asks a multitude of queries such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of private derangement and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist beyond our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute consciousness of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and choice, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a host of other things, functions because it is profoundly touching. Ideas and emotion perfectly coincide in a moment where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past civilisations to which her tutor responds: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the classical physics outlasts her sadly truncated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was infrequently questioned. What was discussed, especially in the beginning, were his doubts about the effectiveness of art: something he often talked about in discussions. “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 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 addresses no major issues.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a continuous critique on money, marriage, ethics, class, the fall of the nobility and the rise of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a series of works that deal to great effect with the abuse of human rights by oppressive regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident falsely diagnosed mad and locked in a chamber with an authentic madman who believes himself in charge of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the whole orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the cruel absurdities of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with wit and strictness with a