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Every one of the finest dramatists push the frontiers of theatre. Beckett and Pinter did it in their unique way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized subjects – ranging from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the enigma of consciousness – and transform them into humorous, inventive and regularly touching theatrical works. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a great glamorizer of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Discovery

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly thanks to Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to present a short talk on two radio plays by a back then unknown writer referred to as 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 impressed by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was exceptionally polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the ways of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances causing our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the silence, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The typical blend of daring ideas and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a significant moral issue: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the subject of a speech being written by the play’s hero, 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 perils of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was holding a stack of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the years, the feeling of his plays became more and more visible. The breakthrough perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to revival. It asks a multitude of questions such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of private derangement and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist beyond our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute awareness of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and choice, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly emotional. Ideas and sentiment perfectly come together in a scene where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past cultures to which her teacher responds: “Scientific insights seen briefly and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the classical physics outlasts her sadly abbreviated life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was infrequently challenged. What was discussed, especially in the beginning, were his doubts about the efficacy of drama: something he frequently explored in discussions. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a ongoing observation on finance, matrimony, morals, social class, the weakening of the nobility and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a series of works that grapple to powerful results with the violation of individual freedoms by oppressive systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist falsely declared mad and locked in a cell with an authentic madman who imagines himself in charge of an symphony. It was startling both to see the entire LSO on the stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the cruel absurdities of communist repression with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a