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All the outstanding dramatists extend the frontiers of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their distinct manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure themes – from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the puzzle of the mind – and turn them into clever, creative and regularly moving dramas. Theatre, the actor Olivier remarked, is a significant glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Early Encounter

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard early on. That was entirely due to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a short talk on two audio dramas by a back then little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer racked up an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed impeccably gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the workings of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances causing our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The typical blend of daring ideas and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a major philosophical question: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the topic of a talk being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the London Library where he was clutching a pile of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became more and more visible. The key moment perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to restaging. It poses a plethora of queries such as whether any social obligation is the result of personal instability and whether concepts such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute awareness of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and volition, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, works because it is profoundly emotional. Thoughts and sentiment flawlessly come together in a moment where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past civilisations to which her instructor replies: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her sadly abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was rarely questioned. What was debated, notably in the beginning, were his doubts about the effectiveness of drama: something he often talked about in conversations. “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 housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a continuous critique on money, matrimony, values, status, the decline of the upper class and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a series of works that grapple to powerful results with the abuse of human rights by authoritarian systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic wrongly diagnosed insane and locked in a cell with an authentic psychiatric patient who believes himself in command of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard exposing the brutal illogicalities of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “force is met with irony and inflexibility with a