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Every one of the finest playwrights push the frontiers of theatre. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their unique manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric subjects – ranging from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the puzzle of the mind – and transform them into humorous, creative and often emotional dramas. Drama, the actor Olivier noted, is a significant glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Early Encounter

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly because of Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a at that time obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer racked up an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed exceptionally gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the workings of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances leading to our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic blend of conceptual boldness and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a big philosophical question: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the subject of a lecture being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the a library in London where he was clutching a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became more and more apparent. The key moment likely came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to restaging. It raises a whole host of issues such as whether any social obligation is the result of personal instability and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist beyond our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened awareness of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is profoundly touching. Ideas and emotion perfectly merge in a segment where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, laments the demise of past cultures to which her instructor replies: “Scientific insights seen briefly and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe survives her tragically abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was rarely questioned. What was debated, particularly in the early years, were his doubts about the effectiveness of drama: something he often discussed in discussions. “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 the Vietnam War or social 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 believe he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a ongoing observation on wealth, wedlock, values, social class, the decline of the nobility and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a number of works that grapple to great effect with the misuse of individual freedoms by oppressive governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly diagnosed mad and locked in a chamber with an authentic psychiatric patient who believes himself in command of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the whole orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the brutal ridiculousness of communist repression with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a