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All the finest dramatists push the frontiers of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their distinct fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure subjects – ranging from chaos theory to ethical thought and the enigma of consciousness – and turn them into witty, imaginative and frequently moving theatrical works. Theatre, the actor Olivier remarked, is a powerful glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Early Discovery

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly because of a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he requested that I to present a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a back then obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer accumulated an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver 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 grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed impeccably polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the ways of our world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances causing our end. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the silence, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic combination of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a significant moral issue: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether principles adhered to an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your average subject for a play, 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 realised that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs of the London Library where he was clutching a pile of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly apparent. The turning point likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It raises a plethora of queries such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of individual madness and whether concepts such as justice and national pride exist independent of our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened consciousness of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and volition, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a host of other things, functions because it is deeply emotional. Ideas and feeling seamlessly merge in a moment where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, laments the demise of past cultures to which her instructor responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the Newton's world endures beyond her unfortunately cut short life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was rarely challenged. What was debated, particularly in the initial period, were his skepticism about the efficacy of art: something he regularly explored in conversations. “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 the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a ongoing observation on wealth, wedlock, values, social class, the weakening of the aristocracy and the rise of business. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a series of works that engage to powerful results with the violation of individual freedoms by authoritarian regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic falsely diagnosed mad and locked in a room with an genuine psychiatric patient who believes himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the full LSO on stage and to see Stoppard revealing the cruel ridiculousness of communist repression with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with irony and rigidity with a