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Every one of the finest dramatists extend the frontiers of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their unique way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized topics – from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the puzzle of consciousness – and convert them into clever, imaginative and frequently touching dramas. The stage, the actor Olivier once said, is a great glamorizer of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Early Encounter

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly due to Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to give a brief lecture on two radio plays by a then obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer racked up an skyrocketing cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained exceptionally polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the ways of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its brilliance in crafting 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 demise. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the silence, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic blend of conceptual boldness and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a big ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles followed an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the focus of a speech being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was gripping a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became more and more apparent. The breakthrough likely came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to revival. It raises a multitude of questions such as whether any civic duty is the result of personal instability and whether ideas such as fairness and national pride exist outside our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened awareness of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is intensely emotional. Ideas and emotion flawlessly merge in a moment where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past civilizations to which her teacher responds: “Scientific insights seen briefly and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the classical physics survives her unfortunately truncated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was seldom doubted. What was discussed, notably in the initial period, were his reservations about the efficacy of theatre: something he regularly explored 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 the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a ongoing observation on finance, matrimony, values, social class, the weakening of the nobility and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a number of works that deal to significant impact with the abuse of individual freedoms by oppressive regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident incorrectly pronounced mad and imprisoned in a chamber with an real psychiatric patient who imagines himself in command of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the entire LSO on stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the brutal absurdities of communist repression with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with irony and inflexibility with a