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All the finest dramatists push the frontiers of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their unique manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized themes – ranging from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of awareness – and transform them into clever, imaginative and often emotional dramas. Theatre, Laurence Olivier once said, is a great glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Early Discovery

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly due to Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to present a mini-speech on two radio plays by a then unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer ran up an skyrocketing 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 impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed impeccably polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the nature of our world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by character and plot. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances causing our demise. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the silence, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The typical fusion of daring ideas and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a major philosophical question: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles adhered to an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the subject of a talk being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was holding a pile of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly apparent. The breakthrough likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to reproduction. It poses a plethora of questions such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of personal instability and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense awareness of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and choice, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a host of other things, works because it is profoundly emotional. Concepts and emotion perfectly come together in a segment where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past cultures to which her teacher responds: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the classical physics survives her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was seldom challenged. What was contested, notably in the initial period, were his doubts about the efficacy of art: something he regularly talked about in conversations. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a ongoing observation on money, matrimony, ethics, class, the fall of the upper class and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a series of works that deal to great effect with the violation of individual freedoms by dictatorial systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic falsely pronounced insane and imprisoned in a cell with an genuine psychiatric patient who believes himself in charge of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the full orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the cruel illogicalities of communist repression with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and strictness with a