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All the finest playwrights push the frontiers of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their unique manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized topics – from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the enigma of awareness – and transform them into clever, creative and often moving dramas. Drama, Laurence Olivier noted, is a powerful glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Initial Encounter

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was completely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to present a short talk on two radio plays by a then little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, 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 get in touch with his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained perfectly gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the ways of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings 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 portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the stillness, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive combination of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a significant ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether principles obeyed an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the subject of a talk being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering 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 responded.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became more and more visible. The turning point likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It asks a whole host of queries such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of private derangement and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute realization of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, functions because it is deeply touching. Thoughts and emotion flawlessly merge in a scene where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past cultures to which her instructor replies: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the classical physics endures beyond her sadly abbreviated life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was infrequently doubted. What was debated, particularly in the beginning, were his doubts about the efficacy of art: something he often explored in conversations. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk 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 meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a running commentary on finance, matrimony, values, social class, the decline of the upper class and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a number of works that grapple to significant impact with the abuse of civil liberties by authoritarian systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident falsely pronounced mad and confined in a room with an genuine lunatic who imagines himself in charge of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the full orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard revealing the brutal ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with irony and inflexibility with a