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All the outstanding playwrights push the frontiers of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their own fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric topics – ranging from chaos theory to ethical thought and the puzzle of awareness – and turn them into clever, inventive and frequently touching plays. Theatre, Laurence Olivier noted, is a powerful glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Early Encounter

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard early on. That was entirely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he asked me to give a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a back then unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer ran up an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance 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 sniffy first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was perfectly courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the workings of the media.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was always 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 commended for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the silence, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The distinctive blend of daring ideas and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a major moral issue: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles followed an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the focus of a speech being written 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 broken marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs of the London Library where he was gripping a pile of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became ever more apparent. The breakthrough perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to revival. It asks a whole host of queries such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of individual madness and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist beyond our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened realization of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and choice, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, works because it is profoundly touching. Thoughts and feeling seamlessly merge in a scene where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past civilizations to which her tutor responds: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the classical physics survives her unfortunately cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was seldom questioned. What was debated, notably in the early years, were his reservations about the power of art: something he frequently explored in conversations. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a running commentary on money, marriage, values, class, the fall of the aristocracy and the rise of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a series of works that engage to powerful results with the misuse of civil liberties by oppressive systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic incorrectly diagnosed mad and locked in a chamber with an real madman who believes himself in control of an symphony. It was startling both to see the full orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the brutal absurdities of communist repression with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with irony and inflexibility with a