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All the finest dramatists broaden the frontiers of drama. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their distinct fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric themes – from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the mystery of consciousness – and transform them into witty, creative and often touching theatrical works. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a powerful glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Encounter

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly thanks to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a short talk on two broadcast plays by a back then unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer ran up an skyrocketing cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was impeccably polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the ways of our world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances leading to our demise. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the silence, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive combination of daring ideas and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a big moral issue: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the subject of a talk being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the a library in London where he was gripping a pile of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With time, the emotional content of his plays became ever more evident. The key moment perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to revival. It asks a multitude of queries such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of personal instability and whether ideas such as justice and national pride exist independent of our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened realization of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and choice, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, works because it is intensely touching. Thoughts and emotion perfectly coincide in a scene where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past civilisations to which her teacher responds: “Scientific insights caught sight of and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the Newton's world survives her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was seldom challenged. What was debated, especially in the initial period, were his doubts about the power of art: something he regularly explored in conversations. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a continuous critique on money, marriage, values, social class, the fall of the nobility and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a series of works that engage to powerful results with the misuse of individual freedoms by authoritarian governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist falsely pronounced crazy and imprisoned in a chamber with an authentic psychiatric patient who believes himself in charge of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the entire LSO on the stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the brutal illogicalities of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with irony and rigidity with a