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All the finest dramatists broaden the frontiers of theatre. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their unique manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure topics – ranging from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the puzzle of the mind – and transform them into clever, inventive and frequently emotional plays. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a great glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Initial Encounter

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly due to Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a back then little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer ran up an constantly rising taxi bill. 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 captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained exceptionally courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the workings of the media.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the stillness, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The characteristic combination of daring ideas and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a significant moral issue: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether principles adhered to an universal, God-given law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the topic of a talk being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the a library in London where he was gripping a mound of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became more and more visible. The key moment likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It raises a multitude of queries such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of private derangement and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, works because it is deeply touching. Thoughts and sentiment perfectly come together in a moment where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past civilizations to which her instructor replies: “Scientific insights caught sight of and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her sadly truncated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was seldom questioned. What was contested, particularly in the beginning, were his doubts about the effectiveness of drama: something he often talked about in interviews. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a running commentary on finance, marriage, values, status, the decline of the upper class and the rise of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a series of works that deal to great effect with the violation of individual freedoms by oppressive governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic falsely pronounced mad and locked in a chamber with an authentic psychiatric patient who thinks he is in control of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the entire LSO on stage and to see Stoppard exposing the brutal illogicalities of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with irony and inflexibility with a