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All the finest playwrights push the frontiers of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their own manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure subjects – ranging from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the puzzle of awareness – and turn them into humorous, imaginative and regularly moving dramas. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a powerful glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Early Encounter

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely because of a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to give a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a at that time obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer racked up an skyrocketing cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained exceptionally polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the ways of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended 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 prey of random circumstances resulting in our end. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The typical blend of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a major philosophical question: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether principles obeyed an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the topic 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 suffering of a failing marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the a library in London where he was holding a stack of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became ever more evident. The breakthrough likely came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It raises a plethora of queries such as whether any civic duty is the result of individual madness and whether ideas such as fairness and national pride exist beyond our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened consciousness of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and free will, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly moving. Thoughts and emotion perfectly merge in a segment where a gifted youth, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past cultures to which her instructor answers: “Scientific insights glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the Newton's world outlasts her unfortunately truncated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was rarely doubted. What was contested, notably in the initial period, were his doubts about the efficacy of art: something he often discussed in conversations. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a continuous critique on wealth, marriage, morals, class, the decline of the nobility and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a number of works that deal to great effect with the violation of human rights by authoritarian systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident falsely diagnosed insane and locked in a chamber with an authentic psychiatric patient who believes himself in charge of an symphony. It was startling both to see the whole LSO on the stage and to see Stoppard revealing the harsh illogicalities of communist repression with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and strictness with a