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Every one of the finest playwrights push the frontiers of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their distinct manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric subjects – ranging from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the mystery of consciousness – and convert them into humorous, imaginative and regularly moving dramas. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a powerful glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Early Encounter

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly because of a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a short talk on two audio dramas by a then unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer racked up an skyrocketing cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was perfectly polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the workings of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we belatedly 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 brilliance in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances leading to our end. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the quiet, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive fusion of conceptual boldness and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a significant philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the subject of a lecture being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the London Library where he was holding a stack of books that came up 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 likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to reproduction. It poses a multitude of queries such as whether any social obligation is the result of personal instability and whether ideas such as justice and national pride exist beyond our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense consciousness of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and free will, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, works because it is intensely touching. Concepts and emotion seamlessly come together in a moment where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past civilizations to which her instructor responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the Newtonian universe survives her sadly truncated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was rarely doubted. What was contested, particularly in the early years, were his doubts about the efficacy of drama: something he often explored in interviews. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a continuous critique on money, wedlock, ethics, class, the decline of the upper class and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a series of works that grapple to powerful results with the violation of civil liberties by authoritarian systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist falsely pronounced crazy and confined in a cell with an real psychiatric patient who believes himself in control of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the full orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the cruel ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “force is met with wit and rigidity with a