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Every one of the great dramatists push the frontiers of drama. Beckett and Pinter did it in their own fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric subjects – ranging from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the mystery of consciousness – and turn them into witty, creative and regularly moving theatrical works. Theatre, Laurence Olivier noted, is a powerful embellisher of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Early Encounter

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard early on. That was completely because of Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a at that time unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer racked up an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in If You’re 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 cleverness of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained impeccably polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the workings of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances leading to our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the quiet, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic blend of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a significant ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the subject of a speech being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the a library in London where he was gripping a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became ever more apparent. The key moment arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to revival. It asks a whole host of issues such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of personal instability and whether ideas such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute awareness of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and choice, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, functions because it is deeply emotional. Ideas and sentiment flawlessly come together in a scene where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past cultures to which her teacher responds: “Scientific insights glimpsed and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the Newton's world survives her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was seldom doubted. What was contested, especially in the early years, were his skepticism about the efficacy of theatre: something he regularly explored in conversations. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a continuous critique on finance, matrimony, ethics, status, the weakening of the aristocracy and the rise of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a collection of works that engage to powerful results with the abuse of civil liberties by authoritarian governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic falsely diagnosed crazy and locked in a chamber with an authentic lunatic who thinks he is in control of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the entire LSO on stage and to see Stoppard exposing the cruel ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with wit and inflexibility with a