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Every one of the finest playwrights push the frontiers of theatre. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their unique fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure subjects – from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the mystery of the mind – and transform them into witty, imaginative and regularly emotional plays. The stage, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a significant glamoriser of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Encounter

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly because of a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to present a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a at that time little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer ran up an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful 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 currently admire – he remained perfectly courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the ways of our world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its ingenuity 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 John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the stillness, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The distinctive fusion of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a major ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the subject of a speech being written by the play’s main character, 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 perils of a unraveling society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was gripping a stack of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became ever more visible. The key moment perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to revival. It poses a plethora of queries such as whether any civic duty is the result of private derangement and whether concepts such as justice and patriotism exist independent of our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened awareness of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and volition, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is profoundly emotional. Ideas and sentiment flawlessly merge in a scene where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past cultures to which her tutor answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the Newton's world outlasts her unfortunately cut short life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was seldom doubted. What was discussed, particularly in the initial period, were his skepticism about the efficacy of art: something he often talked about 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 the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a continuous critique on money, marriage, values, status, the decline of the nobility and the dominance of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a collection of works that grapple to significant impact with the abuse of civil liberties by oppressive governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic wrongly diagnosed crazy and confined in a room with an genuine psychiatric patient who believes himself in control of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the whole LSO on the stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the brutal illogicalities of communist repression with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with irony and rigidity with a