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Every one of the great dramatists extend the frontiers of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their unique manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure topics – ranging from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of consciousness – and convert them into witty, creative and frequently touching dramas. The stage, the actor Olivier remarked, is a powerful embellisher of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Early Discovery

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly due to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a mini-speech on two radio plays by a back then unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer ran up an skyrocketing cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed impeccably courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the nature of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by character and plot. But, just as we later came to recognise 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 constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The distinctive blend of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a big philosophical question: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the topic of a talk being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the London Library where he was clutching a pile of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became more and more visible. The turning point likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to revival. It poses a multitude of issues such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of personal instability and whether ideas such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense realization of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and free will, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly emotional. Ideas and emotion flawlessly come together in a segment where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past civilizations to which her instructor answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the classical physics outlasts her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was seldom doubted. What was contested, especially in the initial period, were his skepticism about the efficacy of theatre: something he often talked about in conversations. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a running commentary on wealth, marriage, values, social class, the weakening of the upper class and the rise of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a collection of works that deal to powerful results with the misuse of civil liberties by authoritarian systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic falsely pronounced insane and imprisoned in a room with an real madman who imagines himself in control of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the entire LSO on stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the cruel illogicalities of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and strictness with a