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Every one of the finest playwrights push the boundaries of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their distinct fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized themes – from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the puzzle of awareness – and transform them into witty, inventive and frequently touching theatrical works. Theatre, Laurence Olivier once said, is a significant embellisher of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Early Introduction

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to give a brief lecture on two radio plays by a at that time unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer ran up an constantly rising cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was exceptionally polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the workings of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had acted 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 silence, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic blend of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a big moral issue: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether principles followed an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the focus of a speech 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 pain of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the London Library where he was clutching a mound of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became more and more visible. The breakthrough perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to reproduction. It poses a multitude of issues such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of individual madness and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened awareness of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and volition, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, works because it is intensely emotional. Ideas and feeling flawlessly coincide in a scene where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past civilisations to which her teacher replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the Newton's world outlasts her unfortunately cut short life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was rarely challenged. What was debated, notably in the beginning, were his doubts about the effectiveness of theatre: something he regularly talked about in interviews. “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 Vietnam or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a ongoing observation on finance, wedlock, ethics, status, the weakening of the upper class and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a number of works that grapple to significant impact with the misuse of human rights by dictatorial systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident wrongly pronounced insane and locked in a chamber with an real madman who imagines himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the full orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard exposing the harsh absurdities of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a