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Every one of the outstanding playwrights push the frontiers of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their distinct fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric topics – ranging from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the mystery of the mind – and convert them into clever, inventive and regularly emotional plays. The stage, the actor Olivier noted, is a powerful glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Discovery

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely because of Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to give a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a back then unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer racked up an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the cleverness 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 critical first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was impeccably courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the nature of our world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest 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 definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The typical fusion of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a major moral issue: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an universal, God-given law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the topic of a lecture being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance 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 replied.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became ever more evident. The turning point arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It asks a multitude of issues such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of individual madness and whether concepts such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened awareness of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, functions because it is profoundly touching. Thoughts and feeling perfectly merge in a segment where a gifted youth, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past cultures to which her instructor responds: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the Newton's world endures beyond her tragically truncated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was rarely questioned. What was discussed, especially in the early years, were his reservations about the efficacy of drama: something he frequently discussed in discussions. “I used to feel out on a limb,” 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 compunction about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a ongoing observation on money, marriage, values, status, the decline of the upper class and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a collection of works that grapple to powerful results with the violation of human rights by dictatorial governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic wrongly declared mad and imprisoned in a chamber with an real madman who believes himself in control of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the brutal absurdities of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a