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All the finest playwrights broaden the frontiers of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their unique manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric subjects – from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the enigma of the mind – and turn them into witty, imaginative and often emotional dramas. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a significant glamorizer of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Early Encounter

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 producer. In 1966 he asked me to present a short talk on two radio plays by a at that time little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer ran up an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed perfectly polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the ways of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the quiet, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The typical 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 big philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles adhered to an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the subject of a lecture being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the a library in London where he was holding a stack of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With time, the emotional content of his plays became ever more evident. The turning point arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It raises a plethora of queries such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of personal instability and whether notions such as justice and patriotism exist beyond our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened realization of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and free will, classicism and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, works because it is profoundly emotional. Thoughts and emotion flawlessly coincide in a segment where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past cultures to which her tutor replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the Newton's world outlasts her sadly cut short life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was seldom doubted. What was debated, particularly in the initial period, were his doubts about the effectiveness 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 jerk if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a continuous critique on finance, wedlock, morals, class, the weakening of the nobility and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a collection of works that engage to great effect with the abuse of civil liberties by authoritarian governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic incorrectly diagnosed crazy and imprisoned in a cell with an real madman who imagines himself in charge of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the whole LSO on stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the harsh illogicalities of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a