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Every one of the finest playwrights broaden the frontiers of theatre. Beckett and Pinter did it in their unique manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure subjects – from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of awareness – and transform them into witty, creative and often emotional dramas. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a powerful embellisher of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Discovery

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely thanks to Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to present a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a back then obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer ran up an constantly rising cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed exceptionally polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the nature of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by character and plot. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, 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 praised for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances leading to our demise. 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 resisting the silence, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic blend of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a major philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles followed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the subject of a speech being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was clutching a mound of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With time, the feeling of his plays became ever more visible. The key moment perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It poses a plethora of queries such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of individual madness and whether notions such as justice and national pride exist beyond our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened realization of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and choice, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, works because it is profoundly moving. Thoughts and sentiment seamlessly come together in a moment where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past cultures to which her teacher answers: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe survives her unfortunately cut short life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was seldom challenged. What was contested, notably in the beginning, were his doubts about the effectiveness of drama: something he frequently talked about in interviews. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a running commentary on money, marriage, values, social class, the fall of the upper class and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a collection of works that grapple to significant impact with the abuse of individual freedoms by oppressive governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic wrongly pronounced mad and imprisoned in a chamber with an authentic psychiatric patient who imagines himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard exposing the harsh ridiculousness of communist repression with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a