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Every one of the finest dramatists broaden the frontiers of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their distinct way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric topics – from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the enigma of consciousness – and transform them into clever, creative and regularly emotional theatrical works. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a great glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Encounter

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard early on. That was completely because of a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a mini-speech on two radio plays by a at that time little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer accumulated an ever escalating taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was exceptionally courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the nature of our world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances leading to our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the silence, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The typical fusion of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a significant philosophical question: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions followed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the focus of a speech being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the a library in London where he was holding a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became ever more visible. The turning point perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to restaging. It raises a multitude of questions such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of individual madness and whether notions such as justice and patriotism exist beyond our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened awareness of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and choice, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is profoundly moving. Ideas and feeling flawlessly come together in a moment where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, laments the loss of past cultures to which her instructor replies: “Scientific insights caught sight of and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the classical physics endures beyond her sadly truncated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was infrequently questioned. What was contested, notably in the early years, were his reservations about the effectiveness of drama: something he frequently 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 the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a running commentary on wealth, marriage, values, social class, the fall of the aristocracy and the rise of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a collection of works that engage to significant impact with the violation of human rights by dictatorial systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly pronounced mad and imprisoned in a cell with an authentic psychiatric patient who imagines himself in command of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the entire orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the harsh illogicalities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a