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Every one of the outstanding dramatists push the boundaries of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their distinct fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure topics – from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the mystery of consciousness – and turn them into clever, imaginative and often touching dramas. Theatre, the actor Olivier noted, is a powerful glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Discovery

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly thanks to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to give a short talk on two audio dramas by a then little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer accumulated an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained exceptionally courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the nature of the media.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances leading to our end. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the silence, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The typical blend of daring ideas and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a significant moral issue: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether principles adhered to an absolute, God-given law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the topic 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 failing marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was holding a pile of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became more and more apparent. The key moment perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to reproduction. It poses a multitude of issues such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of private derangement and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute awareness of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and free will, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is intensely touching. Ideas and sentiment perfectly coincide in a segment where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, laments the demise of past civilizations to which her tutor replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe survives her tragically abbreviated life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was rarely questioned. What was discussed, especially in the early years, were his reservations about the efficacy of drama: something he often talked about in interviews. “I used to feel alone,” 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 hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a ongoing observation on money, wedlock, morals, social class, the decline of the aristocracy and the rise of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a collection of works that deal to great effect with the misuse of human rights by dictatorial regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic falsely diagnosed insane and confined in a chamber with an real lunatic who thinks he is in command of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the whole LSO on stage and to see Stoppard revealing the brutal illogicalities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “force is met with wit and strictness with a