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Every one of the great playwrights push the boundaries of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their own manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure topics – from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the enigma of awareness – and transform them into humorous, imaginative and often touching plays. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a great glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Early Introduction

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard early on. That was wholly because of Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to present a short talk on two audio dramas by a then unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer racked up an constantly rising taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity 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 currently admire – he stayed impeccably gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the ways of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The typical fusion of intellectual audacity and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a significant ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the subject of a speech being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the London Library where he was gripping a pile of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the years, the feeling of his plays became increasingly visible. The turning point likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to revival. It asks a plethora of questions such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of individual madness and whether concepts such as fairness and national pride exist outside our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute awareness of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and volition, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, functions because it is intensely moving. Thoughts and feeling perfectly merge in a scene where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, laments the demise of past cultures to which her instructor responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the Newton's world outlasts her unfortunately cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was infrequently doubted. What was contested, notably in the early years, were his reservations about the power of art: something he frequently talked about in discussions. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a ongoing observation on wealth, marriage, values, status, the weakening of the upper class and the rise of business. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a number of works that grapple to powerful results with the abuse of civil liberties by dictatorial governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident wrongly pronounced crazy and imprisoned in a cell with an authentic madman who believes himself in charge of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the entire LSO on stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the cruel absurdities of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with irony and strictness with a