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All the outstanding playwrights broaden the frontiers of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their distinct fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric subjects – from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the mystery of consciousness – and convert them into witty, creative and often moving theatrical works. Drama, Laurence Olivier once said, is a significant glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Initial Encounter

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely because of a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he invited me to present a short talk on two broadcast plays by a then unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer racked up an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was impeccably polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the nature of our world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances causing our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The distinctive blend of conceptual boldness and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a significant ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the topic of a talk being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was holding a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the years, the feeling of his plays became ever more visible. The key moment perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to revival. It raises a plethora of issues such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of individual madness and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist beyond our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense awareness of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and choice, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly emotional. Ideas and sentiment seamlessly come together in a segment where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, laments the loss of past cultures to which her teacher replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the Newton's world survives her sadly truncated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was seldom questioned. What was discussed, particularly in the beginning, were his doubts about the efficacy of art: something he often talked about in conversations. “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 avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a running commentary on money, marriage, values, social class, the decline of the nobility and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a collection of works that deal to significant impact with the violation of individual freedoms by oppressive systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic falsely pronounced mad and imprisoned in a room with an authentic madman who imagines himself in command of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the full LSO on stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the cruel illogicalities of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with wit and rigidity with a