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Every one of the outstanding dramatists push the frontiers of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their own way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized themes – from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of the mind – and convert them into clever, inventive and frequently touching theatrical works. Theatre, Laurence Olivier once said, is a great glamorizer of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Early Encounter

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely because of Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to present a short talk on two radio plays by a then obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer accumulated an constantly rising cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was perfectly polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the ways of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its brilliance 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 random circumstances causing our end. I remember 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 pushing back the quiet, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The typical fusion of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a significant moral issue: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an absolute, God-given law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the subject of a speech being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was clutching a stack of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the years, the feeling of his plays became increasingly visible. The breakthrough likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It asks a whole host of issues such as whether any social obligation is the outcome 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 realization of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and free will, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, functions because it is deeply touching. Concepts and feeling seamlessly merge in a segment where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past civilizations to which her teacher responds: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe outlasts her unfortunately cut short life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was seldom questioned. What was debated, especially in the beginning, were his reservations about the efficacy of art: 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 shit if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a ongoing observation on finance, marriage, ethics, status, the decline of the upper class and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a series of works that grapple to great effect with the abuse of civil liberties by oppressive regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly declared crazy and confined in a cell with an real lunatic who believes himself in control of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the whole orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the brutal illogicalities of communist repression with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with irony and strictness with a