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Every one of the outstanding playwrights extend the frontiers of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their unique fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized themes – from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the puzzle of the mind – and convert them into witty, inventive and regularly touching plays. The stage, the actor Olivier remarked, is a great glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Discovery

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard early on. That was wholly thanks to Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he invited me to give a short talk on two broadcast plays by a at that time obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer racked up an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was impeccably courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the workings of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances leading to our demise. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the stillness, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic fusion of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a significant moral issue: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether principles adhered to an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the topic of a lecture being developed 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 unraveling society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the a library in London where he was holding a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became ever more apparent. The turning point likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to restaging. It asks a plethora of queries such as whether any social obligation is the result of personal instability and whether concepts such as fairness and national pride exist beyond our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute awareness of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and volition, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is deeply moving. Ideas and emotion seamlessly coincide in a moment where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past cultures to which her teacher answers: “Scientific insights glimpsed and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her tragically cut short life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was infrequently doubted. What was debated, especially in the initial period, were his skepticism about the power of theatre: something he frequently discussed in interviews. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a running commentary on money, matrimony, morals, class, the decline of the nobility and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a series of works that deal to powerful results with the violation of human rights by oppressive systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic falsely declared mad and confined in a cell with an real lunatic who thinks he is in command of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the full LSO on stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the harsh illogicalities of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with irony and strictness with a