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Every one of the outstanding dramatists extend the frontiers of theatre. Beckett and Pinter did it in their distinct way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric subjects – from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the enigma of consciousness – and transform them into humorous, creative and regularly moving theatrical works. Drama, Laurence Olivier once said, is a significant embellisher of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Encounter

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard early on. That was wholly due to Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he requested that I to give a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a at that time unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer ran up an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed exceptionally polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the workings of our world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was consistently 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 praised for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our end. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the silence, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The typical fusion of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a major ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the focus of a talk being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was holding a pile of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became ever more visible. The key moment likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to restaging. It asks a whole host of questions such as whether any public commitment is the result of individual madness and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist beyond our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and volition, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is profoundly touching. Concepts and feeling perfectly merge in a scene where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past cultures to which her tutor replies: “Scientific insights seen briefly and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe survives her tragically truncated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was seldom questioned. What was contested, especially in the early years, were his reservations about the efficacy of theatre: something he regularly talked about in discussions. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a continuous critique on finance, matrimony, morals, social class, the weakening of the nobility and the rise of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a number of works that engage to powerful results with the abuse of human rights by oppressive regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident wrongly declared crazy and confined in a cell with an genuine psychiatric patient who thinks he is in command of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard exposing the harsh illogicalities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a