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Every one of the great playwrights push the frontiers of drama. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their unique fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric themes – ranging from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of the mind – and convert them into witty, inventive and often emotional plays. The stage, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a significant embellisher of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Initial Discovery

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard early on. That was wholly due to Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a brief lecture on two radio plays by a then obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer accumulated an ever escalating cab fare. And in 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 had the chance to meet their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained perfectly courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the workings of our world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the stillness, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic fusion of intellectual audacity and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a major philosophical question: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an absolute, God-given law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the subject of a talk being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a fractured marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was clutching a stack of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the feeling of his plays became more and more apparent. The key moment perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It poses a multitude of queries such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of personal instability and whether ideas such as justice and patriotism exist beyond our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened realization of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is deeply emotional. Concepts and feeling perfectly coincide in a segment where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, laments the loss of past cultures to which her instructor responds: “Scientific insights seen briefly and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the Newton's world endures beyond her sadly truncated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was infrequently challenged. What was contested, particularly in the initial period, were his skepticism about the efficacy of art: something he frequently explored in discussions. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a running commentary on finance, matrimony, ethics, status, the fall of the nobility and the rise of business. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a series of works that engage to great effect with the misuse of civil liberties by authoritarian systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident incorrectly declared crazy and locked in a room with an authentic madman who imagines himself in command of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the whole LSO on the stage and to see Stoppard revealing the harsh ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a