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All the great playwrights push the frontiers of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their distinct way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric topics – ranging from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the mystery of the mind – and turn them into witty, inventive and frequently emotional theatrical works. The stage, Laurence Olivier once said, is a great embellisher of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Discovery

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard early on. That was entirely thanks to Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a brief lecture on two radio plays by a back then unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer racked up an constantly rising taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed perfectly courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the nature of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances resulting in our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic combination of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a big philosophical question: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles followed an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the focus of a talk being developed by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the London Library 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 the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became increasingly visible. The key moment likely came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to restaging. It poses a multitude of issues such as whether any social obligation is the result of private derangement and whether ideas such as justice and patriotism exist outside our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened consciousness of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and choice, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is profoundly touching. Concepts and sentiment perfectly coincide in a scene where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past civilizations to which her tutor replies: “Scientific insights seen briefly and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the classical physics outlasts her sadly cut short life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was seldom questioned. What was debated, particularly in the beginning, were his doubts about the effectiveness of theatre: something he frequently explored in discussions. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person 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 the play by Wilde offers a continuous critique on wealth, wedlock, ethics, status, the fall of the nobility and the dominance of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a collection of works that engage to great effect with the abuse of civil liberties by authoritarian systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly declared insane and locked in a cell with an authentic psychiatric patient who imagines himself in command of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the full LSO on the stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the cruel illogicalities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with irony and rigidity with a