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All the great playwrights broaden the frontiers of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their unique way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric subjects – from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the mystery of consciousness – and convert them into humorous, inventive and frequently emotional plays. The stage, the actor Olivier once said, is a significant glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Initial Discovery

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely because of Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he requested that I to present a mini-speech on two radio plays by a then little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer ran up an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was impeccably gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the ways of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances leading to our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The typical blend of daring ideas and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a major ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the focus of a lecture being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a fractured marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the entrance of the London Library where he was holding a mound of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly visible. The key moment arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to revival. It raises a whole host of questions such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of private derangement and whether ideas such as justice and national pride exist beyond our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened awareness of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and volition, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly moving. Ideas and feeling flawlessly coincide in a scene where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past civilizations to which her tutor replies: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the classical physics endures beyond her unfortunately cut short life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was infrequently questioned. What was debated, particularly in the initial period, were his doubts about the efficacy of theatre: something he regularly explored in conversations. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a running commentary on money, marriage, values, social class, the weakening of the aristocracy and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a number of works that grapple to great effect with the abuse of human rights by authoritarian systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident incorrectly diagnosed mad and locked in a cell with an real psychiatric patient who imagines himself in command of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the brutal absurdities of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with wit and inflexibility with a