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Every one of the finest playwrights push the frontiers of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their unique manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized themes – ranging from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the mystery of consciousness – and convert them into witty, inventive and frequently moving plays. The stage, Laurence Olivier once said, is a great glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Initial Discovery

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly due to Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to present a short talk on two broadcast plays by a back then little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer ran up an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained exceptionally courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the nature of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances leading to our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the silence, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The distinctive combination of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a significant philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether principles followed an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the subject of a speech being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – 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, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was holding a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became ever more evident. The breakthrough perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to revival. It raises a multitude of questions such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of personal instability and whether ideas such as fairness and national pride exist beyond our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute awareness of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, works because it is intensely emotional. Thoughts and feeling seamlessly come together in a segment where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past civilizations to which her teacher responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the Newton's world endures beyond her tragically abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was rarely questioned. What was contested, particularly in the beginning, were his reservations about the efficacy of theatre: something he regularly discussed in conversations. “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 housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a ongoing observation on finance, wedlock, ethics, class, the decline of the nobility and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a number of works that deal to great effect with the abuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic falsely pronounced insane and locked in a chamber with an authentic madman who believes himself in control of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the full orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the cruel illogicalities of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a