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All the finest playwrights push the frontiers of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their unique manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure subjects – ranging from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the puzzle of awareness – and convert them into witty, inventive and regularly moving dramas. Theatre, the actor Olivier noted, is a significant glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Discovery

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard early on. That was wholly due to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a short talk on two broadcast plays by a then little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer ran up an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was exceptionally courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the ways of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances causing our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the stillness, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive blend of intellectual audacity and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a significant ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles adhered to an absolute, God-given law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the focus of a talk being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was holding a stack of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly visible. The breakthrough arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to restaging. It raises a multitude of questions such as whether any public commitment is the result of individual madness and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist outside our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense consciousness of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and volition, classicism and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, works because it is deeply touching. Concepts and sentiment perfectly coincide in a segment where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past civilisations to which her instructor replies: “Scientific insights glimpsed and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe survives her unfortunately truncated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was seldom doubted. What was debated, especially in the beginning, were his reservations about the power of theatre: something he regularly explored in interviews. “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 qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a running commentary on finance, wedlock, values, class, the weakening of the upper class and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a number of works that engage to great effect with the violation of individual freedoms by authoritarian governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident falsely diagnosed mad and confined in a cell with an authentic psychiatric patient who thinks he is in command of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the whole LSO on the stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the harsh illogicalities of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with irony and strictness with a