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Every one of the outstanding playwrights push the frontiers of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their distinct fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure subjects – ranging from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the mystery of consciousness – and transform them into clever, imaginative and often touching theatrical works. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a significant glamoriser of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Early Discovery

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard early on. That was entirely due to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to give a short talk on two radio plays by a then unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer racked up an constantly rising cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was impeccably gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the ways of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our end. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the silence, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic blend of conceptual boldness and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a significant philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions followed an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the focus of a speech being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a fractured marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s success – 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 entrance of the London Library where he was holding a pile of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With time, the feeling of his plays became increasingly evident. The breakthrough perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to reproduction. It poses a whole host of issues such as whether any civic duty is the result of individual madness and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist beyond our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened consciousness of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and free will, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, works because it is intensely emotional. Ideas and sentiment flawlessly coincide in a segment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, laments the demise of past civilizations to which her instructor replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the classical physics outlasts her tragically cut short life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was seldom challenged. What was contested, particularly in the initial period, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of art: something he regularly explored in interviews. “I used to feel isolated,” 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 avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a ongoing observation on finance, wedlock, ethics, social class, the decline of the upper class and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a number of works that engage to significant impact with the violation of human rights by authoritarian governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic incorrectly pronounced insane and imprisoned in a cell with an authentic lunatic who thinks he is in charge of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard revealing the brutal ridiculousness of communist repression with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a