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All the finest playwrights extend the frontiers of theatre. Beckett and Pinter did it in their distinct manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized themes – from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the mystery of awareness – and convert them into clever, inventive and frequently touching plays. Drama, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a great glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Initial Encounter

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was completely because of a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to present a short talk on two audio dramas by a at that time little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer accumulated an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was impeccably courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the nature of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by character and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the silence, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The distinctive fusion of daring ideas and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a significant philosophical question: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the topic of a speech being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

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

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly evident. The key moment likely came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It asks a multitude of questions such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of personal instability and whether ideas such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute awareness of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and free will, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, works because it is profoundly moving. Concepts and sentiment flawlessly coincide in a moment where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past civilizations to which her tutor replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the Newtonian universe survives her unfortunately cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was rarely doubted. What was discussed, especially in the beginning, were his reservations about the effectiveness of drama: something he often talked about in conversations. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a ongoing observation on wealth, marriage, values, social class, the decline of the nobility and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a collection of works that grapple to powerful results with the violation of individual freedoms by dictatorial regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic incorrectly pronounced crazy and locked in a room with an real lunatic who imagines himself in charge of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the entire orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the cruel ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with irony and rigidity with a