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All the outstanding dramatists extend the frontiers of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their distinct fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric themes – from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the mystery of awareness – and convert them into humorous, creative and regularly moving dramas. Drama, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a great glamorizer of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Early Introduction

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly because of Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a short talk on two radio plays by a then obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer racked up an ever escalating cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed impeccably courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the nature of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances leading to our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The distinctive fusion of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a major philosophical question: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules followed an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the subject of a talk being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the anguish of a fractured marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the London Library where he was gripping a mound of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With time, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly visible. The turning point perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to revival. It poses a plethora of issues such as whether any social obligation is the result of personal instability and whether ideas such as fairness and national pride exist outside our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened awareness of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and free will, classicism and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, works because it is intensely moving. Thoughts and emotion perfectly merge in a scene where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past civilisations to which her teacher responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newton's world endures beyond her tragically truncated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was rarely challenged. What was debated, especially in the beginning, were his reservations about the power of art: something he often explored in interviews. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a ongoing observation on money, wedlock, values, social class, the weakening of the nobility and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a number of works that grapple to great effect with the abuse of civil liberties by dictatorial governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic wrongly declared crazy and confined in a cell with an genuine psychiatric patient who thinks he is in charge of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the cruel absurdities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with wit and strictness with a