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Every one of the great dramatists push the frontiers of theatre. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their own way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure themes – ranging from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the mystery of consciousness – and turn them into witty, imaginative and often emotional plays. Drama, Laurence Olivier noted, is a great glamoriser of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Initial Discovery

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard early on. That was completely due to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to give a mini-speech on two radio plays by a then obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer accumulated an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained impeccably polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the nature of the media.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by character and plot. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances leading to our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “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 fusion of conceptual boldness and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a big moral issue: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the topic of a speech being developed by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the a library in London where he was holding a pile of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became ever more visible. The key moment likely came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to restaging. It raises a plethora of questions such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of individual madness and whether ideas such as justice and national pride exist beyond our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute realization of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and free will, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly moving. Thoughts and emotion flawlessly come together in a segment where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past cultures to which her teacher responds: “Scientific insights caught sight of and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the classical physics endures beyond her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was seldom questioned. What was contested, particularly in the initial period, were his doubts about the power of theatre: something he frequently explored in conversations. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a running commentary on money, marriage, morals, social class, the decline of the upper class and the rise of business. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a number of works that engage to powerful results with the abuse of human rights by oppressive governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic incorrectly pronounced mad and confined in a chamber with an genuine lunatic who thinks he is in control of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the cruel illogicalities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with irony and inflexibility with a