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All the outstanding dramatists extend the frontiers of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their distinct fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric topics – from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the mystery of awareness – and turn them into clever, imaginative and regularly emotional theatrical works. Drama, the actor Olivier remarked, is a significant embellisher of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Discovery

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was completely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to present a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a back then little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer racked up an skyrocketing cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness 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 perfectly courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the workings of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances resulting in our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the stillness, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The typical blend of daring ideas and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a significant moral issue: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions followed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the subject of a speech being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the entrance 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 time, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly evident. The breakthrough arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to revival. It poses a whole host of issues such as whether any public commitment is the result of individual madness and whether ideas such as justice and national pride exist beyond our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense consciousness of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and volition, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is profoundly emotional. Ideas and sentiment perfectly coincide in a scene where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past civilisations to which her tutor responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her tragically truncated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was infrequently questioned. What was contested, especially in the early years, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of theatre: something he often discussed in discussions. “I used to feel out on a limb,” 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 qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a ongoing observation on wealth, marriage, values, social class, the decline of the nobility and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a series of works that grapple to great effect with the abuse of individual freedoms by oppressive governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic incorrectly diagnosed insane and locked in a cell with an authentic lunatic who imagines himself in control of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the brutal ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with wit and inflexibility with a