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Every one of the outstanding playwrights extend the frontiers of drama. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their own fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized themes – ranging from chaos theory to ethical thought and the enigma of the mind – and convert them into humorous, inventive and frequently emotional theatrical works. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a powerful glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Initial Discovery

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely thanks to Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he invited me to give a short talk on two audio dramas by a back then obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer racked up an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed perfectly gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the nature of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by character and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances causing our end. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the stillness, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The typical combination of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a big moral issue: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an absolute, God-given law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the subject of a speech being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs of the London Library where he was clutching a mound of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly evident. The turning point likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to revival. It asks a multitude of issues such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of private derangement and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened realization of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and choice, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a host of other things, functions because it is profoundly emotional. Thoughts and sentiment flawlessly merge in a moment where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, laments the loss of past civilisations to which her tutor answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the classical physics endures beyond her tragically cut short life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was rarely questioned. What was debated, notably in the beginning, were his doubts about the efficacy of drama: something he regularly talked about in conversations. “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 housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a ongoing observation on wealth, wedlock, ethics, social class, the fall of the aristocracy and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a series of works that deal to powerful results with the abuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic falsely pronounced insane and confined in a chamber with an genuine psychiatric patient who believes himself in charge of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the whole orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the harsh illogicalities of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with wit and rigidity with a