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All the great playwrights extend the frontiers of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their distinct fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized subjects – ranging from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the puzzle of awareness – and convert them into witty, inventive and often moving theatrical works. Theatre, Laurence Olivier once said, is a great glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Initial Discovery

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely due to Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to give a brief lecture on two radio plays by a then obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer accumulated an ever escalating 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 impressed by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed impeccably courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the workings of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances leading to our demise. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the silence, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The distinctive combination of intellectual audacity and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a major ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether principles adhered to an universal, God-given law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the topic of a talk being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the London Library where he was holding a stack of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly apparent. The key moment likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to reproduction. It asks a multitude of queries such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of private derangement and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense awareness of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and free will, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, works because it is intensely emotional. Thoughts and emotion seamlessly come together in a segment where a gifted youth, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past cultures to which her teacher replies: “Scientific insights glimpsed and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe survives her unfortunately cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was rarely doubted. What was contested, especially in the beginning, were his doubts about the power of art: something he frequently explored in interviews. “I used to feel alone,” 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 compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a continuous critique on money, wedlock, morals, class, the weakening of the upper class and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a series of works that grapple to great effect with the misuse of human rights by oppressive governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic incorrectly declared insane and confined in a room with an authentic madman who imagines himself in command of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the entire orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the cruel absurdities of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with irony and strictness with a