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All the finest playwrights extend the frontiers of theatre. Beckett and Pinter did it in their unique fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure topics – ranging from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the mystery of the mind – and turn them into witty, creative and regularly moving theatrical works. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a great embellisher of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Encounter

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly due to Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to give a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a at that time little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer accumulated an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet 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 sniffy opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed impeccably polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the workings of our world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances leading to our extinction. 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 word is all. The word is resisting the quiet, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The characteristic combination of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a major philosophical question: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether principles obeyed an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the topic of a speech being developed by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs of the a library in London 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 emotional content of his plays became more and more evident. The breakthrough likely came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to reproduction. It asks a plethora of issues such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of personal instability and whether notions such as justice and national pride exist independent of our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and free will, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is intensely touching. Ideas and emotion flawlessly come together in a moment where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past cultures to which her instructor replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the Newton's world survives her sadly abbreviated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was rarely doubted. What was contested, particularly in the initial period, were his reservations about the power of drama: something he often explored in interviews. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a ongoing observation on finance, marriage, morals, class, the decline of the aristocracy and the dominance of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a number of works that deal to great effect with the abuse of human rights by authoritarian regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist falsely pronounced mad and confined in a chamber with an real lunatic who imagines himself in command of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the brutal ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with irony and inflexibility with a