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Every one of the outstanding dramatists push the frontiers of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their own way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure subjects – from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the mystery of awareness – and convert them into clever, inventive and frequently emotional theatrical works. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a great glamorizer of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Early Discovery

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard early on. That was entirely due to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to give a short talk on two broadcast plays by a back then little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer racked up an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met 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 sniffy premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was impeccably courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the workings of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we later 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 brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances causing 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, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The characteristic fusion of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a significant moral issue: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether principles obeyed an universal, God-given law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the focus of a speech being developed by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a fractured marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the London Library where he was holding a mound of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With time, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly visible. The turning point likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to revival. It poses a multitude of queries such as whether any civic duty is the result of personal instability and whether ideas such as justice and patriotism exist beyond our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute consciousness of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and volition, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is profoundly touching. Ideas and sentiment seamlessly come together in a segment where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, laments the demise of past civilizations to which her instructor answers: “Scientific insights glimpsed and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the classical physics outlasts her tragically abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was infrequently doubted. What was discussed, particularly in the initial period, were his skepticism about the power of theatre: something he regularly explored in conversations. “I used to feel out on a limb,” 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 compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a continuous critique on wealth, wedlock, morals, class, the fall of the nobility and the rise of business. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a series of works that grapple to great effect with the misuse of human rights by oppressive systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic incorrectly diagnosed mad and imprisoned in a chamber with an genuine madman who believes himself in command of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the brutal illogicalities of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with wit and inflexibility with a