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Every one of the finest playwrights extend the frontiers of drama. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their unique manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized topics – ranging from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the enigma of consciousness – and turn them into clever, inventive and regularly emotional plays. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a great glamoriser of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Encounter

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely due to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to present a short talk on two broadcast plays by a at that time little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer accumulated an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed perfectly polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the workings of our world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances causing our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the silence, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic fusion of conceptual boldness and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a major moral issue: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules followed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the focus of a speech being developed 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 suffering of a broken marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the London Library where he was gripping a pile of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly apparent. The breakthrough perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It raises a whole host of issues such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of personal instability and whether concepts such as justice and patriotism exist outside our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense awareness of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is deeply emotional. Concepts and sentiment perfectly coincide in a scene where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past civilisations to which her teacher replies: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the Newton's world endures beyond her tragically truncated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was seldom questioned. What was contested, notably in the beginning, were his doubts about the power of drama: something he regularly talked about in conversations. “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 housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a ongoing observation on money, matrimony, morals, class, the decline of the nobility and the rise of business. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a series of works that grapple to powerful results with the abuse of individual freedoms by oppressive regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic incorrectly declared mad and imprisoned in a room with an authentic madman who imagines himself in control of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the brutal absurdities of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with irony and strictness with a