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Every one of the finest dramatists broaden the frontiers of theatre. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their own fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized themes – from chaos theory to ethical thought and the mystery of consciousness – and turn them into witty, imaginative and frequently emotional plays. Theatre, the actor Olivier noted, is a powerful glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Initial Encounter

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard early on. That was wholly because of Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he requested that I to present a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a at that time unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer racked up an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was impeccably gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the ways of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances causing our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the quiet, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive fusion of daring ideas and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a big ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your average subject for a play, 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 understood that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs 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 passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly apparent. The turning point arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to revival. It asks a plethora of issues such as whether any social obligation is the result of private derangement and whether concepts such as fairness and national pride exist beyond our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and volition, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, works because it is profoundly emotional. Concepts and feeling perfectly come together in a segment where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, laments the demise of past civilizations to which her tutor answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the classical physics survives her sadly cut short life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was infrequently challenged. What was discussed, especially in the initial period, were his skepticism about the efficacy of theatre: something he regularly talked about in interviews. “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 allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a running commentary on money, matrimony, morals, status, the decline of the upper class and the dominance of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a collection of works that deal to powerful results with the misuse of human rights by authoritarian regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic wrongly declared insane and locked in a room with an genuine psychiatric patient who believes himself in control of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the full orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the cruel illogicalities of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a