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All the great dramatists extend the frontiers of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their unique manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure topics – from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of consciousness – and convert them into witty, inventive and regularly emotional plays. Theatre, Laurence Olivier once said, is a powerful glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Initial Discovery

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard early on. That was entirely because of Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he invited me to give a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a at that time little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer racked up an ever escalating taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained perfectly polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the workings of our world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances causing our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “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 touching and even tragic.”

The distinctive fusion of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a big philosophical question: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether principles adhered to an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the focus of a speech being developed 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 pain of a broken marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the stairs 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 replied.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became more and more visible. The key moment perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to revival. It poses a plethora of questions such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of private derangement and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute awareness of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is intensely touching. Concepts and sentiment seamlessly come together in a scene where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past cultures to which her teacher responds: “Scientific insights seen briefly and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the classical physics endures beyond her tragically cut short life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was seldom doubted. What was debated, particularly in the early years, were his doubts about the power of art: something he frequently explored in discussions. “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 qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a continuous critique on finance, marriage, ethics, social class, the decline of the nobility and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a series of works that grapple to great effect with the abuse of human rights by oppressive governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic wrongly declared mad and imprisoned in a chamber with an genuine madman who imagines himself in control of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the whole orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the brutal ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with wit and rigidity with a