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All the finest dramatists extend the frontiers of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their own way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure subjects – ranging from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the puzzle of consciousness – and convert them into clever, creative and regularly touching theatrical works. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a great glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Early Encounter

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was completely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to give a short talk on two radio plays by a back then unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer accumulated an ever escalating taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed exceptionally polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the nature of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances leading to our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the quiet, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The typical combination of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a major ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions followed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the focus of a talk being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the a library in London 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 more and more visible. The key moment perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It asks a whole host of issues such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of individual madness and whether ideas such as justice and patriotism exist independent of our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened realization of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and volition, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, works because it is deeply moving. Concepts and feeling seamlessly coincide in a segment where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past civilizations to which her instructor replies: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her tragically cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was seldom challenged. What was contested, especially in the initial period, were his skepticism about the power of art: something he regularly discussed in discussions. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a running commentary on finance, matrimony, morals, social class, the weakening of the nobility and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a series of works that deal to great effect with the violation of individual freedoms by dictatorial governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic falsely declared crazy and imprisoned in a cell with an authentic psychiatric patient who thinks he is in control of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the full orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the cruel ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with wit and rigidity with a