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Every one of the outstanding dramatists broaden the frontiers of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their own way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure subjects – ranging from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of consciousness – and convert them into witty, imaginative and frequently moving plays. Theatre, the actor Olivier once said, is a powerful glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Initial Discovery

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly because of a man named Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a mini-speech on two radio plays by a then unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer ran up an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained exceptionally gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the ways of our world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had acted 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 stillness, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive blend of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a big moral issue: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether principles adhered to an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the subject of a talk 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 anguish of a broken marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the a library in London 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 feeling of his plays became ever more evident. The turning point perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to revival. It raises a multitude of issues such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of individual madness and whether notions such as justice and national pride exist outside our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened realization of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and free will, classicism and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is profoundly touching. Thoughts and emotion seamlessly merge in a scene where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past civilizations to which her tutor answers: “Scientific insights caught sight of and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the Newton's world outlasts her tragically truncated life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was seldom doubted. What was debated, notably in the initial period, were his reservations about the power of theatre: something he regularly talked about in interviews. “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 social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a continuous critique on money, marriage, values, status, the fall of the aristocracy and the dominance of business. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a series of works that deal to great effect with the misuse of civil liberties by oppressive governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident incorrectly diagnosed mad and confined in a chamber with an real psychiatric patient who thinks he is in control of an symphony. It was startling both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard revealing the cruel ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with irony and inflexibility with a