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All the outstanding playwrights broaden the frontiers of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their unique manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric themes – ranging from chaos theory to ethical thought and the puzzle of consciousness – and convert them into humorous, creative and regularly moving dramas. Theatre, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a great embellisher of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Discovery

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was completely due to Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to present a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a back then unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer racked up an ever escalating cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was impeccably gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the nature of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances leading to our demise. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the stillness, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The typical combination of intellectual audacity and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a big ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions followed an absolute, God-given law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the subject of a lecture 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 suffering of a failing marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the London Library where he was clutching a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With time, the feeling of his plays became more and more visible. The breakthrough perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to reproduction. It poses a multitude of issues such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of personal instability and whether concepts such as fairness and national pride exist beyond our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense realization of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and volition, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is deeply touching. Concepts and emotion seamlessly come together in a segment where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, laments the demise of past cultures to which her teacher answers: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the classical physics outlasts her tragically abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was infrequently challenged. What was discussed, especially in the beginning, were his reservations about the effectiveness of drama: something he often explored in discussions. “I used to feel alone,” 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 compunction about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a running commentary on money, wedlock, morals, social class, the decline of the nobility and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a collection of works that grapple to powerful results with the abuse of civil liberties by authoritarian systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly pronounced insane and imprisoned in a cell with an authentic psychiatric patient who believes himself in control of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the entire orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard revealing the harsh absurdities of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a