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Every one of the finest dramatists extend the frontiers of theatre. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their own manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure themes – from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the enigma of the mind – and transform them into witty, imaginative and regularly moving theatrical works. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a powerful embellisher of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Initial Discovery

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was completely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a mini-speech on two radio plays by a back then obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer accumulated an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their young author.

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

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances causing our demise. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the stillness, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The typical blend of conceptual boldness and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a big philosophical question: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles adhered to an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the topic of a lecture being developed by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the London Library where he was clutching a mound of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became more and more apparent. The key moment arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to revival. It raises a whole host of issues such as whether any public commitment is the result of personal instability and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute consciousness of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and free will, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly touching. Ideas and feeling flawlessly merge in a segment where a gifted youth, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past civilisations to which her instructor answers: “Scientific insights seen briefly and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the classical physics endures beyond her sadly cut short life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was infrequently doubted. What was debated, particularly in the early years, were his doubts about the effectiveness 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 Vietnam or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a continuous critique on finance, wedlock, values, status, the decline of the upper class and the rise of business. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a number of works that grapple to powerful results with the abuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic wrongly diagnosed insane and locked in a room with an authentic madman who imagines himself in charge of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the entire orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the brutal illogicalities of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with wit and strictness with a