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All the finest playwrights extend the frontiers of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their own fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric themes – ranging from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the mystery of awareness – and turn them into clever, imaginative and frequently touching dramas. The stage, the actor Olivier noted, is a significant glamoriser of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Encounter

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard early on. That was entirely because of a man named Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to present a short talk on two broadcast plays by a then unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer ran 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 time announcement service. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed impeccably courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the ways of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to understand 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 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 arbitrary circumstances causing our end. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the stillness, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The typical fusion of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a significant moral issue: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an universal, God-given law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the topic of a talk being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the London Library where he was holding a stack of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became more and more visible. The key moment perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to restaging. It poses a multitude of issues such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of personal instability and whether ideas such as justice and patriotism exist outside our understanding 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 explores fatalism and free will, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a host of other things, works because it is intensely emotional. Concepts and feeling perfectly merge in a moment where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, laments the loss of past civilizations to which her tutor responds: “Scientific insights seen briefly and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was infrequently questioned. What was debated, particularly in the early years, were his reservations about the power of drama: something he regularly discussed in conversations. “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 the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a ongoing observation on finance, matrimony, morals, class, the decline of the nobility and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a series of works that grapple to powerful results with the abuse of civil liberties by oppressive governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly pronounced mad and locked in a chamber with an real lunatic who believes himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the harsh ridiculousness of communist repression with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with wit and rigidity with a