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Every one of the outstanding playwrights push the frontiers of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their distinct manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure subjects – ranging from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the mystery of awareness – and convert them into witty, inventive and frequently moving theatrical works. The stage, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a significant embellisher of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Discovery

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was completely due to Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he invited me to present a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a at that time obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer racked up an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained perfectly courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the workings of the media.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the silence, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic fusion of daring ideas and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a major ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the topic of a talk being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the London Library 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 years, the feeling of his plays became increasingly evident. The key moment likely came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It asks a whole host of questions such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of private derangement and whether ideas such as fairness and national pride exist beyond our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute realization of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and free will, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a host of other things, works because it is deeply moving. Thoughts and feeling perfectly merge in a segment where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past cultures to which her instructor responds: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was rarely challenged. What was discussed, notably in the initial period, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of art: something he frequently talked about in conversations. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a running commentary on finance, wedlock, values, social class, the fall of the upper class and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a collection of works that grapple to powerful results with the abuse of human rights by authoritarian systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic incorrectly declared insane and locked in a chamber with an authentic lunatic who thinks he is in command of an symphony. It was startling both to see the entire orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the brutal illogicalities of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a