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All the great playwrights broaden the frontiers of theatre. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their own manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure topics – ranging from chaos theory to ethical thought and the enigma of consciousness – and turn them into clever, imaginative and regularly emotional theatrical works. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a great glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Encounter

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly due to Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to give a short talk on two broadcast plays by a at that time obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer accumulated an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was perfectly polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the ways of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we eventually 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 commended for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the silence, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic blend of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a big ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the topic of a lecture being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the London Library where he was holding a mound of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly apparent. The turning point perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to reproduction. It poses a multitude of questions such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of individual madness and whether notions such as justice and patriotism exist outside our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense realization of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and free will, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is deeply touching. Thoughts and sentiment flawlessly coincide in a segment where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past cultures to which her tutor replies: “Scientific insights seen briefly and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the Newtonian universe survives her tragically truncated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was infrequently questioned. What was discussed, notably in the early years, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of theatre: something he often explored in discussions. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a continuous critique on wealth, wedlock, ethics, class, the fall of the aristocracy and the dominance of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a number of works that engage to great effect with the abuse of civil liberties by oppressive governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident wrongly diagnosed insane and imprisoned in a room with an authentic madman who imagines himself in charge of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the full LSO on stage and to see Stoppard exposing the brutal illogicalities of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and strictness with a