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All the finest dramatists push the frontiers of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their own way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric themes – from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of the mind – and turn them into clever, inventive and regularly touching theatrical works. The stage, the actor Olivier noted, is a significant glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Initial Discovery

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely thanks to Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to present a mini-speech on two radio plays by a at that time obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer racked up an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained exceptionally courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the workings of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the quiet, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic fusion of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a major ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the focus of a talk being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the London Library where he was gripping a stack of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the feeling of his plays became more and more evident. The breakthrough likely came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to reproduction. It asks a whole host of questions such as whether any public commitment is the result of personal instability and whether concepts such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute realization of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and free will, classicism and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, works because it is intensely touching. Thoughts and emotion flawlessly coincide in a segment where a gifted youth, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past civilizations to which her teacher responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the classical physics outlasts her tragically truncated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was rarely questioned. What was discussed, particularly in the beginning, were his reservations about the efficacy of drama: something he often discussed 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 the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To avert indirectly 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 the play by Wilde presents a ongoing observation on money, matrimony, morals, social class, the weakening of the upper class and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a series of works that deal to powerful results with the abuse of civil liberties by dictatorial regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic falsely declared crazy and confined in a cell with an authentic psychiatric patient who imagines himself in command of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the entire LSO on stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the harsh ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with wit and rigidity with a