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All the outstanding playwrights broaden the boundaries of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their distinct manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized topics – from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the puzzle of the mind – and transform them into clever, imaginative and regularly emotional theatrical works. The stage, Laurence Olivier noted, is a powerful glamorizer of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Early Introduction

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was completely because of Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a at that time obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer ran up an ever escalating taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was exceptionally gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the workings of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances causing our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The distinctive blend of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a significant philosophical question: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles followed an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the topic of a talk being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Revelation

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

With time, the emotional content of his plays became ever more visible. The breakthrough likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to restaging. It poses a whole host of questions such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of private derangement and whether concepts such as fairness and national pride exist beyond our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense realization of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and free will, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, works because it is deeply emotional. Concepts and emotion seamlessly coincide in a moment where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past civilisations to which her teacher answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newton's world survives her unfortunately cut short life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was infrequently challenged. What was contested, especially in the early years, were his doubts about the power of drama: something he often explored in interviews. “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 social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a continuous critique on money, marriage, ethics, social class, the decline of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a collection of works that engage to great effect with the abuse of human rights by oppressive regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident wrongly diagnosed crazy and confined in a cell with an real lunatic who believes himself in charge of an symphony. It was startling both to see the entire LSO on stage and to see Stoppard revealing the harsh illogicalities of communist repression with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with irony and inflexibility with a