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All the great dramatists push the frontiers of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their distinct manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized topics – ranging from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of consciousness – and convert them into humorous, imaginative and regularly emotional theatrical works. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a significant glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Discovery

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a at that time obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer accumulated an constantly rising taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained exceptionally polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the workings of the media.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances causing our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the silence, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The characteristic fusion of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a major ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether principles adhered to an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the subject of a lecture being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a fractured marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the London Library where he was clutching a mound of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the feeling of his plays became ever more visible. The breakthrough arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to restaging. It raises a plethora of questions such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of private derangement and whether notions such as justice and national pride exist independent of our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened realization of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and choice, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is intensely emotional. Concepts and sentiment flawlessly coincide in a segment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past civilizations to which her tutor answers: “Scientific insights caught sight of and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking 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 discussed, notably in the early years, were his doubts about the effectiveness of theatre: something he frequently explored in conversations. “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 hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a ongoing observation on finance, marriage, ethics, class, the decline of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a number of works that deal to significant impact with the abuse of human rights by dictatorial systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident falsely pronounced insane and imprisoned in a cell with an authentic psychiatric patient who imagines himself in control of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the whole LSO on stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the brutal absurdities of communist repression with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a