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Every one of the finest playwrights extend the frontiers of drama. Beckett and Pinter did it in their unique fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure topics – from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the mystery of the mind – and turn them into clever, inventive and often emotional plays. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a great glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Early Encounter

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly thanks to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a mini-speech on two radio plays by a at that time little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished 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 voice of the time. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained perfectly courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the nature of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances leading to our demise. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The distinctive combination of conceptual boldness and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a major philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules followed an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the focus of a talk being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the entrance of the London Library where he was clutching a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became more and more visible. The breakthrough perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to reproduction. It asks a multitude of questions such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of private derangement and whether concepts such as fairness and national pride exist beyond our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, works because it is profoundly emotional. Ideas and sentiment seamlessly coincide in a scene where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, laments the loss of past civilizations to which her instructor replies: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newton's world endures beyond her sadly abbreviated life.

Debating the Power of Art

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 frequently talked about in interviews. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a running commentary on finance, wedlock, values, status, the weakening of the upper class and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a collection of works that engage to significant impact with the abuse of civil liberties by dictatorial systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic wrongly pronounced crazy and imprisoned in a room with an genuine madman who thinks he is in control of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the full orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard revealing the harsh illogicalities of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with irony and strictness with a