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Every one of the outstanding playwrights extend the frontiers of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their unique fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric themes – from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the mystery of the mind – and turn them into witty, imaginative and frequently touching dramas. The stage, Laurence Olivier noted, is a powerful glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Early Discovery

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly thanks to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a brief lecture on two radio plays by a at that time little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer ran up an constantly rising cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was perfectly courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the workings of the media.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances leading to our demise. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the stillness, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic combination of daring ideas and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a big ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the focus of a lecture being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the London Library where he was gripping a stack of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly apparent. The breakthrough perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to restaging. It raises a multitude of questions such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of private derangement and whether ideas such as justice and national pride exist beyond our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute realization of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and free will, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is deeply touching. Thoughts and emotion flawlessly coincide in a segment where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past civilizations to which her instructor answers: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the Newton's world survives her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was infrequently challenged. What was debated, notably in the initial period, were his reservations about the efficacy of art: something he often discussed in discussions. “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 Vietnam or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a continuous critique on wealth, marriage, ethics, class, the decline of the nobility and the rise of business. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a collection of works that grapple to significant impact with the misuse of civil liberties by dictatorial systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic wrongly declared crazy and confined in a chamber with an genuine psychiatric patient who thinks he is in charge of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the brutal absurdities of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with wit and rigidity with a