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All the finest dramatists push the frontiers of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their unique fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure subjects – ranging from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the mystery of consciousness – and transform them into humorous, imaginative and often touching theatrical works. The stage, Laurence Olivier once said, is a powerful embellisher of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Early Introduction

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was completely due to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to give a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a at that time little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer accumulated an skyrocketing cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed perfectly courteous. 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 Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the stillness, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The typical combination of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a major moral issue: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles followed an absolute, God-given law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the focus of a talk being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the a library in London where he was holding a pile of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became more and more apparent. The turning point perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to reproduction. It poses a multitude of queries such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of private derangement and whether concepts such as justice and patriotism exist beyond our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened realization of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is profoundly emotional. Ideas and emotion seamlessly merge in a moment where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past civilizations to which her instructor responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her sadly cut short life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was seldom challenged. What was contested, especially in the early years, were his reservations about the efficacy of drama: something he often discussed in discussions. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a ongoing observation on finance, wedlock, morals, social class, the decline of the nobility and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a collection of works that grapple to great effect with the misuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist falsely declared crazy and confined in a cell with an real lunatic who believes himself in command of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the whole LSO on the stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the brutal absurdities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and strictness with a