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Every one of the outstanding dramatists push the frontiers of theatre. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their own fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric subjects – from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the mystery of consciousness – and transform them into humorous, imaginative and frequently emotional plays. Theatre, Laurence Olivier once said, is a powerful embellisher of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Initial Discovery

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a short talk on two radio plays by a at that time little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer accumulated an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed impeccably gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the nature of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the silence, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The typical combination of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a major ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles followed an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the topic of a lecture being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was holding a pile of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became more and more visible. The turning point arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to revival. It raises a plethora of issues such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of individual madness and whether ideas such as justice and national pride exist outside our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and volition, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly touching. Concepts and emotion flawlessly come together in a segment where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past civilizations to which her instructor replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the classical physics outlasts her tragically abbreviated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was infrequently doubted. What was debated, especially in the early years, were his skepticism about the efficacy of art: something he regularly talked about in conversations. “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 housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a running commentary on finance, matrimony, morals, social class, the weakening of the nobility and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a collection of works that deal to great effect with the abuse of human rights by oppressive systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident incorrectly declared insane and confined in a chamber with an authentic psychiatric patient who believes himself in command of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the whole LSO on the stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the harsh absurdities of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a