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Every one of the great playwrights extend the frontiers of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their unique manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric themes – ranging from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the mystery of awareness – and transform them into witty, inventive and frequently moving plays. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a significant embellisher of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Initial Discovery

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard early on. That was completely because of a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he asked me to give a short talk on two radio plays by a then unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer ran up an constantly rising taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was exceptionally polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the nature of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances leading to our end. 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 resisting the quiet, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive combination of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a significant moral issue: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether principles adhered to an universal, God-given law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the topic of a speech being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was holding a pile of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With time, the emotional content of his plays became ever more apparent. The key moment likely came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It poses a whole host of queries such as whether any civic duty is the result of private derangement and whether concepts such as justice and national pride exist beyond our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute realization of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and free will, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, works because it is profoundly touching. Thoughts and emotion seamlessly coincide in a segment where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past civilizations to which her tutor responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her tragically abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was rarely doubted. What was discussed, notably in the initial period, were his skepticism about the power of theatre: something he often explored in conversations. “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 social 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 believe he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a running commentary on wealth, marriage, ethics, social class, the weakening of the upper class and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a number of works that engage to significant impact with the abuse of human rights by dictatorial regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic falsely pronounced insane and locked in a room with an real lunatic who imagines himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the whole orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the harsh absurdities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a