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Every one of the finest dramatists extend the frontiers of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their own way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure topics – ranging from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the puzzle of awareness – and turn them into clever, imaginative and regularly emotional plays. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a powerful embellisher of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Discovery

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard early on. That was entirely because of a man named Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to give a short talk on two radio plays by a then obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer accumulated an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the ingenuity 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 dismissive opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained perfectly gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the nature of our world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances causing our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the silence, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The distinctive fusion of daring ideas and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a major philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules followed an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the topic of a talk being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the a library in London where he was clutching a stack of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became increasingly evident. The breakthrough likely came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to revival. It raises a whole host of questions such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of personal instability and whether ideas such as fairness and national pride exist outside our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened realization of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and free will, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, works because it is deeply moving. Concepts and feeling flawlessly coincide in a segment where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past civilizations to which her tutor replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the Newtonian universe survives her sadly cut short life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was seldom questioned. What was debated, especially in the early years, were his reservations about the efficacy of drama: something he regularly discussed in discussions. “I used to feel alone,” 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 compunction about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a running commentary on finance, matrimony, values, social class, the decline of the aristocracy and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a number of works that grapple to great effect with the misuse of individual freedoms by authoritarian governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident incorrectly diagnosed mad and imprisoned in a chamber with an real lunatic who believes himself in charge of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the full orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the harsh illogicalities of communist repression with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a