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Every one of the finest dramatists push the frontiers of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their distinct manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized themes – ranging from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the mystery of the mind – and turn them into humorous, inventive and often moving dramas. The stage, Laurence Olivier noted, is a significant embellisher of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Early Encounter

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard early on. That was entirely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a brief lecture on two radio plays by a at that time unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer ran up an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was exceptionally courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the nature of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances causing our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the silence, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic fusion of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a big ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an universal, God-given law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the topic of a lecture being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs 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 time, the sentiment of his plays became ever more evident. The key moment perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to revival. It raises a multitude of queries such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of individual madness and whether concepts such as fairness and national pride exist outside our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened consciousness of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and free will, classicism and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is profoundly emotional. Ideas and sentiment flawlessly come together in a moment where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past cultures to which her instructor replies: “Scientific insights seen briefly and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the classical physics survives her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was seldom doubted. What was discussed, especially in the beginning, were his skepticism about the power of theatre: something he regularly discussed in discussions. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a ongoing observation on money, matrimony, morals, class, the fall of the nobility and the rise of business. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a collection of works that engage to significant impact with the violation of civil liberties by dictatorial systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident falsely diagnosed insane and imprisoned in a cell with an genuine psychiatric patient who believes himself in command of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the cruel absurdities of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “force is met with irony and inflexibility with a