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All the outstanding playwrights extend the frontiers of theatre. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their own fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized themes – ranging from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the mystery of the mind – and turn them into witty, creative and often touching theatrical works. The stage, Laurence Olivier noted, is a powerful embellisher of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Initial Encounter

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly thanks to Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to present a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a back then unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer ran up an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was exceptionally courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the ways of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances resulting in our end. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the stillness, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The distinctive fusion of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a significant moral issue: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether principles adhered to an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the focus of a lecture being developed by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was gripping a pile of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became ever more evident. The turning point likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to restaging. It poses a multitude of queries such as whether any civic duty is the result of private derangement and whether notions such as justice and national pride exist independent of our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened awareness of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and choice, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly emotional. Ideas and sentiment seamlessly come together in a segment where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past civilizations to which her instructor replies: “Scientific insights seen briefly and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the Newton's world outlasts her tragically abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was infrequently doubted. What was discussed, especially in the early years, were his skepticism about the efficacy of drama: something he frequently explored in conversations. “I used to feel alone,” 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 hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a continuous critique on wealth, wedlock, ethics, social class, the fall of the aristocracy and the dominance of business. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a collection of works that deal to significant impact with the violation of individual freedoms by dictatorial governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic falsely pronounced mad and locked in a cell with an real lunatic who thinks he is in control of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard revealing the cruel ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a