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All the great playwrights extend the frontiers of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their unique way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized themes – from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the mystery of the mind – and convert them into witty, imaginative and frequently touching theatrical works. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a great glamoriser of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Early Discovery

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard early on. That was entirely due to Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a then unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer racked up an constantly rising taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was perfectly gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the nature of the media.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated 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 understand that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances leading to our end. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the stillness, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive blend of intellectual audacity and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a significant moral issue: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the topic of a speech being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

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

With the passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became ever more visible. The breakthrough perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to reproduction. It poses a plethora of issues such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of personal instability and whether ideas such as fairness and national pride exist beyond our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is intensely emotional. Ideas and emotion perfectly merge in a segment where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past cultures to which her teacher replies: “Scientific insights seen briefly and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the Newton's world endures beyond her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was rarely challenged. What was contested, especially in the initial period, were his skepticism about the efficacy of theatre: something he regularly explored in interviews. “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 Vietnam or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a continuous critique on money, marriage, values, social class, the weakening of the upper class and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a series of works that deal to powerful results with the violation of individual freedoms by oppressive governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic wrongly pronounced crazy and locked in a chamber with an genuine lunatic who imagines himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the entire orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the brutal ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “force is met with irony and inflexibility with a