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Every one of the finest playwrights push the frontiers of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their own manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric topics – from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the puzzle of consciousness – and turn them into clever, imaginative and often touching dramas. Theatre, the actor Olivier noted, is a great glamoriser of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Discovery

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely due to Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a brief lecture on two radio plays by a at that time obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer accumulated an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was impeccably courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the nature of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: 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 consistently a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the quiet, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The characteristic fusion of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a significant moral issue: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether principles followed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the topic of a talk being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was holding a mound of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became more and more visible. The turning point perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It asks a multitude of issues such as whether any social obligation is the result of personal instability and whether concepts such as justice and national pride exist beyond our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute awareness of the ecstasy 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 sentiment perfectly merge in a moment where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, laments the loss of past civilizations to which her teacher answers: “Scientific insights caught sight of and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the classical physics outlasts her unfortunately cut short life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was rarely questioned. What was discussed, notably in the initial period, were his reservations about the effectiveness of theatre: something he often talked about in conversations. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a running commentary on money, wedlock, values, status, the fall of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a series of works that deal to great effect with the misuse of human rights by dictatorial governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly pronounced mad and locked in a room with an genuine psychiatric patient who believes himself in command of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard exposing the harsh illogicalities of communist repression with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “force is met with irony and rigidity with a