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Every one of the finest playwrights push the frontiers of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their own way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric themes – from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the mystery of consciousness – and turn them into clever, creative and often emotional plays. Drama, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a great glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Initial Discovery

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a mini-speech on two radio plays by a then unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer ran up an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed perfectly polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the workings of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, 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 praised for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the silence, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The characteristic combination of daring ideas and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a major moral issue: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether principles adhered to an universal, God-given law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the topic of a talk being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was gripping a mound of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With time, the emotional content of his plays became more and more visible. The key moment likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to reproduction. It raises a plethora of questions such as whether any public commitment is the result of personal instability and whether concepts such as fairness and patriotism exist beyond our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense realization of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, works because it is profoundly moving. Concepts and feeling flawlessly merge in a moment where a gifted youth, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past civilizations to which her tutor replies: “Scientific insights glimpsed and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was rarely questioned. What was debated, notably in the initial period, were his skepticism about the efficacy of art: something he regularly explored in conversations. “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 the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a continuous critique on wealth, matrimony, ethics, social class, the weakening of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a number of works that engage to powerful results with the abuse of individual freedoms by authoritarian systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic falsely pronounced insane and locked in a chamber with an real lunatic who thinks he is in control of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the entire LSO on the stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the harsh illogicalities of communist repression with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with wit and strictness with a