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All the outstanding playwrights push the frontiers of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their own fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure subjects – ranging from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of awareness – and convert them into humorous, imaginative and often moving plays. Theatre, Laurence Olivier once said, is a significant glamorizer of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Discovery

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard early on. That was entirely because of a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a mini-speech on two radio plays by a back then obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer accumulated an skyrocketing taxi bill. 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 cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained perfectly polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the nature of our world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances causing our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the stillness, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The distinctive combination of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a big philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether principles obeyed an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the focus of a talk being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a fractured marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the London Library where he was clutching a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became more and more apparent. The breakthrough arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to reproduction. It asks a plethora of queries such as whether any social obligation is the result of private derangement and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute realization of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and volition, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly touching. Concepts and feeling seamlessly come together in a scene where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past cultures to which her tutor replies: “Scientific insights seen briefly and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the Newton's world outlasts her tragically truncated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was seldom challenged. What was debated, especially in the beginning, were his doubts about the effectiveness of art: something he frequently explored in discussions. “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 social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a running commentary on money, wedlock, morals, status, the weakening of the aristocracy and the rise of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a number of works that grapple to great effect with the abuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly diagnosed insane and locked in a cell with an real lunatic who imagines himself in command of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the brutal absurdities of communist repression with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with irony and rigidity with a