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Every one of the great playwrights broaden the frontiers of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their own fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure subjects – from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the mystery of the mind – and turn them into witty, inventive and regularly touching plays. The stage, the actor Olivier noted, is a significant embellisher of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Early Introduction

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly thanks to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to present a short talk on two audio dramas by a then unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer ran up an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained exceptionally polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the ways of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances causing our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the stillness, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The typical blend of daring ideas and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a big ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles obeyed an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your usual 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 grasped that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Emotional Breakthrough

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

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly apparent. The key moment likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to restaging. It asks a multitude of queries such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of personal instability and whether concepts such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened awareness of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and free will, classicism and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is profoundly moving. Thoughts and sentiment flawlessly coincide in a scene where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, laments the loss of past civilisations to which her instructor responds: “Scientific insights glimpsed and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the Newton's world survives her tragically cut short life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was rarely doubted. What was debated, notably in the beginning, were his reservations about the power of drama: something he regularly talked about in interviews. “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 Vietnam or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a running commentary on money, matrimony, values, status, the weakening of the upper class and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a collection of works that deal to great effect with the violation of individual freedoms by dictatorial systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly diagnosed insane and locked in a room with an genuine madman who thinks he is in command of an symphony. It was startling both to see the whole LSO on the stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the harsh absurdities of communist repression with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and strictness with a