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Every one of the outstanding playwrights extend the frontiers of drama. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their distinct manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized topics – from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the enigma of consciousness – and turn them into clever, imaginative and frequently touching theatrical works. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a powerful embellisher of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Early Discovery

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly due to Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to give a short talk on two audio dramas by a back then obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer ran up an skyrocketing cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed perfectly polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the workings of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances leading to 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 pushing back the quiet, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The typical combination of daring ideas and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a major moral issue: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles adhered to an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the subject of a talk being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with playwright 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, meeting 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 replied.

With time, the feeling of his plays became ever more apparent. The turning point arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to revival. It asks a multitude of questions such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of private derangement and whether notions such as justice and national pride exist outside our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense consciousness of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and free will, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, works because it is deeply touching. Ideas and feeling seamlessly come together in a segment where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past civilizations to which her instructor replies: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the classical physics survives her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was seldom doubted. What was contested, notably in the beginning, were his doubts about the power of drama: something he frequently talked about in interviews. “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 qualms about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a running commentary on wealth, matrimony, morals, status, the decline of the upper class and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a series of works that engage to powerful results with the abuse of civil liberties by oppressive regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic incorrectly declared crazy and locked in a cell with an real psychiatric patient who imagines himself in control of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the entire LSO on stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the harsh ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a