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All the finest playwrights push the frontiers of theatre. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their own fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized topics – from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of the mind – and transform them into humorous, inventive and frequently touching plays. The stage, the actor Olivier remarked, is a great glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Introduction

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard early on. That was wholly thanks to Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to present a brief lecture on two radio plays by a then little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer ran up an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness 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 remained exceptionally gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the nature of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances causing our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the stillness, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive combination of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a major moral issue: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether principles adhered to an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the topic of a lecture being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs 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 responded.

With time, the feeling of his plays became more and more visible. The breakthrough arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to revival. It poses a plethora of issues such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of individual madness and whether notions such as justice and patriotism exist outside our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense consciousness of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and free will, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, functions because it is deeply moving. Ideas and emotion perfectly coincide in a segment where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past civilisations to which her tutor responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the Newton's world survives her tragically abbreviated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was infrequently doubted. What was contested, particularly in the initial period, were his reservations about the effectiveness of drama: something he often talked about 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 housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a running commentary on wealth, marriage, ethics, status, the fall of the upper class and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a series of works that deal to powerful results with the abuse of civil liberties by authoritarian regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic incorrectly diagnosed crazy and locked in a room with an real lunatic who thinks he is in charge of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the full orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the harsh illogicalities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with wit and rigidity with a