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Every one of the finest dramatists extend the frontiers of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their own manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure themes – from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the mystery of consciousness – and convert them into clever, imaginative and often touching plays. The stage, the actor Olivier remarked, is a significant embellisher of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Discovery

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard early on. That was completely due to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a back then unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer ran up an skyrocketing cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained perfectly gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the ways of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by character and plot. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the stillness, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive fusion of conceptual boldness and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a big ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles followed an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the topic of a speech being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was gripping a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With time, the feeling of his plays became increasingly visible. The breakthrough arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It raises a multitude of questions such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of individual madness and whether ideas such as justice and patriotism exist beyond our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute realization of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, works because it is profoundly emotional. Concepts and sentiment seamlessly come together in a moment where a gifted youth, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past civilizations to which her teacher responds: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newton's world endures beyond her sadly abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was seldom questioned. What was debated, notably in the initial period, were his doubts about the effectiveness of art: 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 bad person if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a running commentary on money, marriage, morals, status, the weakening of the nobility and the rise of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a number of works that deal to great effect with the abuse of civil liberties by dictatorial systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident falsely diagnosed crazy and imprisoned in a cell with an real lunatic who thinks he is in command of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the brutal illogicalities of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a