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All the outstanding playwrights push the frontiers of drama. Beckett and Pinter did it in their distinct manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric topics – ranging from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of consciousness – and turn them into clever, creative and frequently emotional theatrical works. Drama, the actor Olivier remarked, is a great glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Early Introduction

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard early on. That was completely because of Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to give a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a at that time obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer accumulated an ever escalating cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained exceptionally polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the workings of our world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances causing our end. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic combination of daring ideas and heartfelt depth 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 instilled reaction to history or whether principles adhered to an universal, God-given law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the topic of a talk being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Revelation

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

With time, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly evident. The turning point perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to restaging. It raises a whole host of queries such as whether any civic duty is the result of personal instability and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened consciousness of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and volition, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is intensely moving. Ideas and sentiment flawlessly merge in a scene where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, laments the demise of past civilizations to which her teacher answers: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the Newton's world outlasts her unfortunately truncated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was infrequently doubted. What was discussed, notably in the initial period, were his reservations about the power of theatre: something he frequently discussed in interviews. “I used to feel alone,” 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 qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a continuous critique on finance, matrimony, values, status, the decline of the upper class and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a number of works that engage to powerful results with the misuse of civil liberties by authoritarian regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident incorrectly pronounced crazy and confined in a room with an authentic lunatic who imagines himself in command of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the harsh absurdities of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “force is met with irony and inflexibility with a