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Every one of the great dramatists push the frontiers of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their distinct manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric topics – from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the mystery of consciousness – and transform them into clever, creative and frequently touching theatrical works. The stage, the actor Olivier remarked, is a powerful glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Initial Encounter

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was completely due to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to give a mini-speech on two radio plays by a then unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer ran up an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained impeccably courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the ways of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances leading to our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the quiet, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The typical blend of intellectual audacity and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a major philosophical question: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether principles followed an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the topic of a speech being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs of the London Library where he was clutching a stack of books that came 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 evident. The turning point perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to revival. It asks a whole host of queries such as whether any social obligation is the result of individual madness and whether concepts such as justice and patriotism exist beyond our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute consciousness of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and free will, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is profoundly moving. Ideas and sentiment flawlessly coincide in a scene where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past civilizations to which her teacher responds: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the Newton's world endures beyond her sadly abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was rarely challenged. What was discussed, especially in the beginning, were his doubts about the power of drama: something he frequently discussed 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 hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a continuous critique on wealth, wedlock, morals, status, the decline of the upper class and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a series of works that grapple to great effect with the abuse of civil liberties by authoritarian systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly declared mad and confined in a chamber with an real lunatic who believes himself in command of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard revealing the brutal absurdities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a