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Every one of the finest dramatists push the frontiers of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their unique way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric topics – from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the enigma of consciousness – and turn them into humorous, imaginative and regularly touching theatrical works. Drama, Laurence Olivier once said, is a powerful glamoriser of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Introduction

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard early on. That was completely due to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a at that time little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer ran up an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained perfectly courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the workings of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we eventually came to realise 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 commended for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the quiet, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive combination of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a big ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an universal, God-given law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the topic of a lecture being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was clutching a pile of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became more and more evident. The key moment likely came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to reproduction. It raises a multitude of issues such as whether any civic duty is the result of individual madness and whether notions such as justice and patriotism exist outside our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute consciousness of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, works because it is deeply touching. Thoughts and feeling flawlessly coincide in a segment where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past civilizations to which her instructor responds: “Scientific insights seen briefly and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the Newton's world endures beyond her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was rarely doubted. What was discussed, particularly in the early years, were his skepticism about the power of art: something he often explored in discussions. “I used to feel out on a limb,” 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 refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a ongoing observation on finance, marriage, morals, class, the decline of the upper class and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a number of works that deal to great effect with the abuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident incorrectly diagnosed mad and imprisoned in a room with an genuine psychiatric patient who thinks he is in command of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the full orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the brutal ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with irony and inflexibility with a