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Every one of the great playwrights extend the frontiers of drama. Beckett and Pinter did it in their distinct manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric subjects – ranging from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the enigma of the mind – and turn them into humorous, imaginative and frequently touching dramas. The stage, Laurence Olivier noted, is a great glamoriser of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Introduction

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a at that time little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer ran up an constantly rising cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed perfectly polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the ways of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances leading to our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the quiet, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic combination of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a big moral issue: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an absolute, God-given law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the subject of a talk being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the a library in London where he was gripping 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 feeling of his plays became more and more apparent. The breakthrough perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to restaging. It poses a multitude of queries such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of individual madness and whether concepts such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense consciousness of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and volition, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, functions because it is deeply touching. Concepts and emotion seamlessly come together in a scene where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, laments the demise of past civilizations to which her teacher answers: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the Newton's world outlasts her tragically cut short life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was seldom doubted. What was contested, notably in the early years, were his doubts about the effectiveness of drama: something he frequently discussed 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 hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a ongoing observation on wealth, matrimony, ethics, social class, the weakening of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a number of works that engage to powerful results with the abuse of human rights by dictatorial systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident falsely diagnosed insane and imprisoned in a chamber with an authentic madman who thinks he is in control of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the whole LSO on the stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the harsh absurdities of communist repression with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and strictness with a