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Every one of the great dramatists broaden the frontiers of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their distinct way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure subjects – ranging from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the enigma of awareness – and convert them into clever, creative and frequently touching dramas. Theatre, the actor Olivier noted, is a powerful embellisher of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Encounter

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly because of Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to present a brief lecture on two radio plays by a then unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer racked up an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was exceptionally polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the ways of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember 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 stillness, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive blend of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a major moral issue: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an unchanging, God-given law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the topic of a speech being developed by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a fractured marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Revelation

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 researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was clutching a mound of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly evident. The key moment likely came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to restaging. It asks a plethora of issues such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of individual madness and whether ideas such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense consciousness of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is profoundly moving. Concepts and emotion seamlessly come together in a moment where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, laments the demise of past cultures to which her teacher answers: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the Newton's world outlasts her tragically cut short life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was infrequently challenged. What was discussed, especially in the beginning, were his doubts about the power of theatre: something he frequently talked about in discussions. “I used to feel isolated,” 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 hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a continuous critique on money, marriage, ethics, class, the decline of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a number of works that engage to significant impact with the abuse of civil liberties by oppressive regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly pronounced crazy and locked in a chamber with an authentic lunatic who thinks he is in charge of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the cruel absurdities of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with wit and rigidity with a