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All the great dramatists push the frontiers of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their unique fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric topics – from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the enigma of consciousness – and convert them into clever, imaginative and frequently touching dramas. Drama, Laurence Olivier once said, is a powerful embellisher of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Encounter

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely due to Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a short talk on two audio dramas by a back then obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer accumulated an ever escalating taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained impeccably gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the nature of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances leading to our end. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the quiet, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive combination of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a major moral issue: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the focus of a speech being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the London Library where he was holding a mound of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With time, the feeling of his plays became increasingly evident. The breakthrough arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to revival. It raises a plethora of questions such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of private derangement and whether notions such as justice and patriotism exist beyond our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute realization of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, works because it is intensely moving. Concepts and sentiment seamlessly come together in a scene where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past civilisations to which her teacher responds: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the classical physics endures beyond her unfortunately truncated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was seldom doubted. What was debated, especially in the initial period, were his doubts about the power of theatre: something he frequently explored in discussions. “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 social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a running commentary on wealth, matrimony, ethics, class, the fall of the nobility and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a collection of works that engage to great effect with the misuse of individual freedoms by oppressive systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly pronounced crazy and confined in a room with an real psychiatric patient who imagines himself in command of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the full LSO on stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the brutal illogicalities of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a