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Every one of the great playwrights extend the frontiers of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their distinct manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure themes – ranging from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the puzzle of consciousness – and convert them into clever, imaginative and regularly moving dramas. Drama, Laurence Olivier once said, is a great embellisher of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Early Encounter

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was completely because of a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a mini-speech on two radio plays by a then little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer racked up an constantly rising cab fare. 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 captivated by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed perfectly gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the workings of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember 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, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The typical fusion of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a major moral issue: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules followed an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the subject of a lecture being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was clutching a stack of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the years, the feeling of his plays became ever more visible. The key moment arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to reproduction. It asks a whole host of queries such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of personal instability and whether notions such as justice and national pride exist independent of our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute consciousness of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, functions because it is deeply touching. Thoughts and sentiment seamlessly coincide in a moment where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past civilisations to which her tutor replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the classical physics endures beyond her sadly abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was rarely doubted. What was contested, especially in the early years, were his skepticism about the efficacy of art: something he often discussed in discussions. “I used to feel out on a limb,” 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 hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a continuous critique on wealth, marriage, values, class, the fall of the upper class and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a number of works that deal to great effect with the abuse of human rights by oppressive systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident falsely diagnosed mad and locked in a chamber with an authentic lunatic who imagines himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the full LSO on the stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the brutal illogicalities of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a