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All the outstanding playwrights extend the boundaries of theatre. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their own way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric subjects – ranging from chaos theory to ethical thought and the puzzle of the mind – and turn them into clever, inventive and frequently touching theatrical works. Drama, the actor Olivier noted, is a great glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Early Introduction

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly due to Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a brief lecture on two radio plays by a then little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer racked up an skyrocketing cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained exceptionally courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the nature of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances causing our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had played 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, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic blend of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a major ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules followed an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the focus of a lecture being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the London Library where he was gripping a pile of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the years, the feeling of his plays became ever more apparent. The turning point perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to reproduction. It asks a plethora of queries such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of private derangement and whether ideas such as fairness and national pride exist beyond our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute awareness of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and volition, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is intensely touching. Concepts and feeling perfectly merge in a scene where a gifted youth, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past civilizations to which her tutor answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newtonian universe outlasts her sadly cut short life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was seldom doubted. What was debated, notably in the initial period, were his doubts about the power of art: something he frequently explored in conversations. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a continuous critique on wealth, wedlock, ethics, status, the weakening of the nobility and the rise of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a number of works that deal to great effect with the abuse of human rights by authoritarian governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic falsely diagnosed mad and locked in a cell with an genuine madman who thinks he is in control of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard revealing the harsh absurdities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with irony and inflexibility with a