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Every one of the great dramatists push the frontiers of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their distinct fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure subjects – ranging from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of the mind – and convert them into clever, imaginative and frequently emotional theatrical works. The stage, the actor Olivier noted, is a significant glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Early Discovery

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely because of a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to give a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a then obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer ran up an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained impeccably courteous. 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 Heartfelt Depth

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances resulting in our end. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the quiet, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The characteristic fusion of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a big moral issue: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether principles followed an universal, God-given law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the focus of a lecture being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the London Library where he was holding a pile of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the feeling of his plays became ever more evident. The turning point perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to revival. It raises a whole host of questions such as whether any civic duty is the result of personal instability and whether notions such as justice and national pride exist independent of our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense awareness of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and volition, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, functions because it is deeply emotional. Concepts and emotion flawlessly merge in a scene where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past civilizations to which her tutor replies: “Scientific insights glimpsed and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe outlasts her tragically cut short life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was seldom questioned. What was discussed, especially in the early years, were his doubts about the efficacy of theatre: something he often explored in interviews. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a continuous critique on finance, marriage, morals, status, the weakening of the nobility and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a number of works that engage to great effect with the violation of human rights by dictatorial governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly declared insane and imprisoned in a cell with an authentic psychiatric patient who thinks he is in control of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the entire orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the brutal ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and strictness with a