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All the great dramatists extend the frontiers of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their distinct fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric topics – from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the enigma of awareness – and turn them into witty, creative and regularly emotional theatrical works. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a significant embellisher of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Early Discovery

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely because of a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to give a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a back then unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer racked up an ever escalating cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV 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 overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the ways of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the quiet, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The characteristic fusion of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a major philosophical question: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the topic of a talk being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched 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 ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the a library in London where he was holding a mound of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly apparent. The key moment arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to reproduction. It asks a whole host of issues such as whether any public commitment is the result of individual madness and whether ideas such as fairness and national pride exist outside our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense realization of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and volition, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is intensely touching. Ideas and emotion seamlessly coincide in a segment where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past cultures to which her tutor answers: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the classical physics endures beyond her unfortunately cut short life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was infrequently challenged. What was discussed, notably in the initial period, were his reservations about the efficacy of art: something he often 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 jerk if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a continuous critique on money, matrimony, ethics, social class, the fall of the upper class and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a series of works that engage to powerful results with the misuse of human rights by authoritarian systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic wrongly pronounced crazy and confined in a chamber with an genuine lunatic who imagines himself in command of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the harsh illogicalities of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and strictness with a