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All the finest playwrights extend the frontiers of drama. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their distinct manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric topics – ranging from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the enigma of awareness – and turn them into witty, imaginative and regularly touching dramas. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a great glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Early Introduction

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly because of a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he asked me to present a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a then little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer accumulated an constantly rising taxi bill. And in If You’re 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 captivated by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed perfectly gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the ways of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the silence, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The typical blend of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a major ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the subject of a talk being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the London Library where he was gripping a mound of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became more and more apparent. The key moment likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to reproduction. It poses a multitude of queries such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of individual madness and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist outside our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened realization of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, works because it is intensely touching. Thoughts and emotion flawlessly come together in a segment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past civilizations to which her instructor responds: “Scientific insights caught sight of and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the Newtonian universe outlasts her sadly abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was seldom challenged. What was contested, notably in the beginning, were his reservations about the efficacy of theatre: something he frequently talked about in discussions. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a continuous critique on money, marriage, values, class, the weakening of the nobility and the rise of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a collection of works that grapple to great effect with the violation of individual freedoms by authoritarian regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic falsely declared insane and locked in a cell with an genuine psychiatric patient who believes himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the entire LSO on the stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the brutal illogicalities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and strictness with a