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Every one of the finest playwrights extend the frontiers of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their distinct way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure themes – ranging from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the enigma of consciousness – and convert them into witty, creative and regularly moving theatrical works. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a significant glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Discovery

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely because of a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he requested that I to present a short talk on two radio plays by a then obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer ran up an constantly rising cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed impeccably courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the nature of our world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the stillness, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The typical blend of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a major philosophical question: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an absolute, God-given law. Not your average theatrical topic, 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 realised that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the a library in London where he was gripping a pile of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With time, the emotional content of his plays became more and more evident. The turning point arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It asks a plethora of queries such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of personal instability and whether ideas such as justice and national pride exist independent of our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute realization of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and free will, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, works because it is intensely emotional. Ideas and feeling flawlessly come together in a scene where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past civilizations to which her teacher replies: “Scientific insights seen briefly and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe survives her sadly abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was infrequently doubted. What was discussed, notably in the initial period, were his reservations about the effectiveness of art: something he often talked about in conversations. “I used to feel out on a limb,” 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 significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a continuous critique on money, marriage, values, class, the decline of the aristocracy and the dominance of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a series of works that engage to significant impact with the abuse of human rights by dictatorial regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist falsely pronounced crazy and imprisoned in a cell with an real psychiatric patient who imagines himself in command of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the whole LSO on stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the cruel absurdities of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with wit and inflexibility with a