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All the outstanding playwrights extend the frontiers of theatre. Beckett and Pinter did it in their own manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric themes – from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of the mind – and transform them into humorous, creative and often emotional plays. Theatre, the actor Olivier once said, is a great glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Early Encounter

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely thanks to Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a then little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer accumulated an constantly rising taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace 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 now love – he remained impeccably courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the workings of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the silence, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic blend of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a major moral issue: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the subject of a speech being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance 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 the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became ever more apparent. The key moment likely came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to restaging. It poses a plethora of queries such as whether any civic duty is the result of personal instability and whether ideas such as fairness and national pride exist beyond our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, functions because it is intensely moving. Ideas and sentiment seamlessly coincide in a segment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past civilisations to which her teacher replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newtonian universe outlasts her sadly cut short life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was seldom doubted. What was contested, notably in the beginning, were his reservations about the effectiveness of drama: something he regularly explored in interviews. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit 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 believe he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a running commentary on money, marriage, morals, class, the fall of the nobility and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a number of works that grapple to significant impact with the misuse of human rights by dictatorial governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident incorrectly declared crazy and imprisoned in a room with an genuine psychiatric patient who believes himself in control of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard revealing the cruel ridiculousness of communist repression with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with wit and strictness with a