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All the outstanding dramatists push the boundaries of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their distinct fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure subjects – from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the mystery of consciousness – and transform them into clever, inventive and frequently touching plays. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a great glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Encounter

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely due to Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a short talk on two audio dramas by a then obscure writer described 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 get in touch with his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed exceptionally polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the ways of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by character and plot. But, just as we later came to understand 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 commended for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the quiet, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The distinctive combination of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a major ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles obeyed an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the subject of a speech being developed by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was gripping a pile of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With time, the feeling of his plays became ever more apparent. The breakthrough likely came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to revival. It raises a whole host of questions such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of individual madness and whether ideas such as justice and national pride exist outside our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute awareness of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and volition, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is deeply emotional. Ideas and emotion seamlessly merge in a scene where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past cultures to which her instructor replies: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the Newton's world endures beyond her sadly cut short life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

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

I think he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a running commentary on wealth, marriage, ethics, social class, the fall of the upper class and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a collection of works that engage to significant impact with the violation of human rights by dictatorial governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident incorrectly diagnosed crazy and confined in a chamber with an genuine lunatic who thinks he is in control of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the whole LSO on the stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the cruel absurdities of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “force is met with wit and inflexibility with a