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Every one of the finest playwrights push the frontiers of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their own manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure themes – ranging from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the mystery of awareness – and transform them into clever, creative and regularly touching theatrical works. The stage, the actor Olivier noted, is a significant embellisher of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Initial Encounter

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely because of Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to present a brief lecture on two radio plays by a at that time obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer racked up an constantly rising cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed exceptionally gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the nature of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances causing our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the silence, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive blend of intellectual audacity and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a major philosophical question: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions followed an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the subject of a speech being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the London Library where he was clutching 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 increasingly visible. The breakthrough likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to reproduction. It asks a plethora of questions such as whether any public commitment is the result of private derangement and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense realization of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and free will, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, functions because it is deeply emotional. Concepts and emotion flawlessly come together in a moment where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past civilisations to which her instructor responds: “Scientific insights seen briefly and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the classical physics survives her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was infrequently doubted. What was contested, especially in the initial period, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of theatre: something he regularly discussed 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 hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a ongoing observation on finance, marriage, values, social class, the decline of the upper class and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a number of works that engage to great effect with the misuse of civil liberties by dictatorial systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic incorrectly pronounced crazy and confined in a room with an authentic madman who thinks he is in control of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the whole orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the harsh absurdities of communist repression with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with irony and rigidity with a