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All the outstanding playwrights push the frontiers of drama. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their distinct manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure topics – from chaos theory to ethical thought and the mystery of consciousness – and convert them into clever, imaginative and frequently emotional dramas. Theatre, Laurence Olivier noted, is a significant embellisher of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Initial Encounter

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard early on. That was entirely because of a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he requested that I to present a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a then unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer racked up an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained impeccably courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the nature of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances causing our end. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the silence, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive blend of daring ideas and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a big moral issue: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions followed an universal, God-given law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the topic of a speech being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the London Library where he was gripping a stack of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became more and more visible. The turning point likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to reproduction. It raises a multitude of questions such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of private derangement and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist beyond our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened awareness of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and free will, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is intensely emotional. Thoughts and sentiment seamlessly come together in a scene where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past civilizations to which her teacher answers: “Scientific insights glimpsed and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newtonian universe survives her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was seldom doubted. What was contested, notably in the early years, were his reservations about the effectiveness of drama: something he regularly discussed in discussions. “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 social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a ongoing observation on wealth, matrimony, values, social class, the weakening of the upper class and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a number of works that grapple to significant impact with the abuse of human rights by oppressive systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic incorrectly declared crazy and locked in a chamber with an authentic lunatic who thinks he is in command of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the cruel ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with wit and rigidity with a