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Every one of the outstanding dramatists broaden the frontiers of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their distinct manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized subjects – from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the puzzle of awareness – and transform them into clever, imaginative and frequently touching theatrical works. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a significant glamorizer of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Early Encounter

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard early on. That was entirely because of Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to present a short talk on two broadcast plays by a back then obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer accumulated an skyrocketing cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained exceptionally courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the ways of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The distinctive fusion of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a big moral issue: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the focus of a talk being written 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 pain of a broken marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Emotional Breakthrough

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

With the passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly evident. The key moment arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to reproduction. It poses a whole host of issues such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of private derangement and whether notions such as justice and patriotism exist outside our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and volition, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, works because it is intensely emotional. Thoughts and emotion perfectly come together in a moment where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past cultures to which her teacher responds: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the Newtonian universe survives her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was rarely challenged. What was discussed, notably in the initial period, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of theatre: something he regularly 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], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a ongoing observation on wealth, wedlock, morals, class, the decline of the nobility and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a series of works that engage to powerful results with the violation 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 Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly pronounced mad and imprisoned in a room with an real madman who imagines himself in control of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the harsh absurdities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with irony and strictness with a