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Every one of the outstanding dramatists push the frontiers of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their unique fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized themes – ranging from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the mystery of the mind – and convert them into humorous, creative and regularly touching plays. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a great embellisher of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Initial Discovery

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was completely because of a man named Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to give a short talk on two radio plays by a back then unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer ran up an ever escalating cab fare. And in 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 emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained impeccably gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the ways of our world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances leading to our end. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the silence, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The typical combination of intellectual audacity and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a significant ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions followed an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the subject of a speech being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the anguish of a fractured marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Emotional Revelation

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

With time, the sentiment of his plays became more and more evident. The key moment likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to revival. It raises a plethora of queries such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of private derangement and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist outside our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened realization of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and free will, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, works because it is deeply emotional. Thoughts and emotion perfectly coincide in a moment where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past cultures to which her tutor responds: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the classical physics outlasts her sadly abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was seldom doubted. What was debated, notably in the initial period, were his reservations about the efficacy of art: something he regularly talked about in interviews. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a running commentary on wealth, matrimony, values, status, the decline of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a collection of works that grapple to great effect with the violation of human rights by oppressive regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident incorrectly declared crazy and confined in a room with an real lunatic who imagines himself in control of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the entire LSO on the stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the brutal ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with irony and inflexibility with a