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All the finest playwrights push the frontiers of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their unique manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure subjects – ranging from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the puzzle of the mind – and turn them into clever, inventive and often emotional theatrical works. The stage, the actor Olivier remarked, is a great glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Early Encounter

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely because of a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to give a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a at that time unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer accumulated an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach 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 youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed impeccably gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the ways of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances causing our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The typical combination of daring ideas and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a big moral issue: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions followed an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the subject of a lecture being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was clutching a stack of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly evident. The breakthrough arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to revival. It poses a whole host of issues such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of private derangement and whether concepts such as fairness and patriotism exist beyond our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened consciousness of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is deeply moving. Thoughts and feeling perfectly merge in a scene where a gifted youth, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past cultures to which her tutor responds: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the classical physics survives her tragically truncated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was seldom doubted. What was contested, notably in the initial period, were his doubts about the efficacy of theatre: something he frequently talked about in discussions. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a continuous critique on money, marriage, ethics, class, the weakening of the upper class and the dominance of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a collection of works that grapple to powerful results with the abuse of human rights by oppressive systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic falsely pronounced crazy and locked in a cell with an real madman who imagines himself in command of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the cruel illogicalities of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with wit and inflexibility with a