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All the finest playwrights push the frontiers of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their unique way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized themes – ranging from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of awareness – and turn them into witty, inventive and regularly moving theatrical works. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a great glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Encounter

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard early on. That was wholly thanks to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a at that time obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer racked up an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was perfectly gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the nature of our world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, 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 praised for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings 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 quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The distinctive combination of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a major moral issue: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether principles followed an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the subject of a speech being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was clutching a mound of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With time, the feeling of his plays became increasingly visible. The key moment perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It asks a multitude of issues such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of individual madness and whether ideas such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense realization of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and choice, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, works because it is profoundly moving. Thoughts and sentiment flawlessly merge in a moment where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past civilizations to which her instructor answers: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the Newton's world endures beyond her unfortunately cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was seldom doubted. What was debated, notably in the early years, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of art: something he often explored in interviews. “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 Vietnam or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a running commentary on wealth, marriage, morals, class, the weakening of the upper class and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a series of works that engage to significant impact with the violation of human rights by authoritarian regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist falsely diagnosed mad and confined in a cell with an authentic madman who imagines himself in charge of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the harsh ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “force is met with wit and strictness with a