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Every one of the finest playwrights extend the frontiers of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their unique fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure subjects – from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the enigma of the mind – and convert them into clever, creative and often moving plays. Drama, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a great glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Early Discovery

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard early on. That was entirely because of a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to give a short talk on two broadcast plays by a at that time unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer accumulated an ever escalating cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It speaks volumes 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 polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the nature of the media.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our end. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the stillness, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic fusion of intellectual audacity and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a significant philosophical question: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the subject of a talk being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting 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 meticulously investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the London Library where he was holding a stack of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became ever more visible. The breakthrough likely came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It poses a multitude of questions such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of private derangement 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 acute realization of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and volition, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is intensely touching. Ideas and sentiment flawlessly come together in a segment where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past cultures to which her tutor replies: “Scientific insights glimpsed and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the Newton's world survives her unfortunately cut short life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was rarely doubted. What was discussed, particularly in the initial period, were his doubts about the effectiveness of drama: something he regularly 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 housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a continuous critique on finance, wedlock, values, class, the decline of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a series of works that deal to powerful results with the abuse of civil liberties by dictatorial governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist falsely pronounced crazy and locked in a cell with an genuine psychiatric patient who thinks he is in charge of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the whole orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the harsh ridiculousness of communist repression with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with wit and rigidity with a