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Every one of the finest dramatists extend the frontiers of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their distinct way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure topics – from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of consciousness – and transform them into witty, creative and regularly emotional dramas. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a powerful embellisher of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Initial Encounter

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard early on. That was wholly because of a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a short talk on two broadcast plays by a then obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer ran up an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained exceptionally polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the nature of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances causing our extinction. 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 resisting the stillness, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The typical blend of intellectual audacity and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a major ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the topic of a lecture being developed by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Revelation

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

With time, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly evident. The turning point perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It asks a whole host of queries such as whether any public commitment is the result of individual madness and whether notions such as justice and national pride exist independent of our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute awareness of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is intensely emotional. Concepts and sentiment flawlessly come together in a scene where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past civilisations to which her teacher replies: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the classical physics endures beyond her sadly cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was infrequently questioned. What was contested, notably in the initial period, were his reservations about the power of drama: something he frequently talked about in conversations. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a running commentary on wealth, wedlock, ethics, social class, the weakening of the aristocracy and the dominance of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a collection of works that engage to powerful results with the abuse of individual freedoms by authoritarian regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident falsely declared insane and locked in a cell with an real psychiatric patient who imagines himself in charge of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the whole orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the harsh illogicalities of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and strictness with a