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Every one of the outstanding dramatists push the frontiers of theatre. Beckett and Pinter did it in their own manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric themes – from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the puzzle of the mind – and turn them into witty, imaginative and often emotional plays. The stage, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a powerful glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Early Encounter

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard early on. That was wholly because of Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a short talk on two audio dramas by a at that time unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer accumulated an skyrocketing cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained impeccably polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the workings of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead 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 victims of random circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the silence, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The characteristic combination of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a big ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the subject of a talk being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the London Library where he was clutching a pile of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With time, the feeling of his plays became ever more apparent. The key moment arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to reproduction. It poses a multitude of questions such as whether any public commitment is the result of individual madness and whether concepts such as fairness and national pride exist beyond our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute realization of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and free will, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is deeply touching. Concepts and feeling seamlessly merge in a scene where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past civilizations to which her instructor answers: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the Newton's world survives her tragically cut short life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was seldom doubted. What was contested, especially in the initial period, were his skepticism about the efficacy of drama: something he often discussed in discussions. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To refer obliquely 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 presents a continuous critique on wealth, wedlock, ethics, social class, the fall of the nobility and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a series of works that deal to great effect with the abuse of individual freedoms by authoritarian governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident incorrectly diagnosed insane and locked in a room with an genuine madman who believes himself in control of an symphony. It was startling both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the cruel absurdities of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with wit and strictness with a