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All the great playwrights broaden the frontiers of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their own way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized topics – from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of the mind – and transform them into clever, imaginative and regularly touching dramas. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a powerful embellisher of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Initial Discovery

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard early on. That was completely thanks to Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to present a short talk on two broadcast plays by a back then obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer ran up an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained exceptionally courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the nature of our world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its cleverness 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 causing our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the silence, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The distinctive fusion of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a significant philosophical question: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles obeyed an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the subject of a speech being prepared 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 broken marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was holding a stack of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the years, the feeling of his plays became more and more evident. The turning point perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It raises a whole host of questions such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of private derangement and whether concepts such as fairness and patriotism exist beyond our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute realization of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and choice, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is intensely emotional. Ideas and sentiment perfectly come together in a moment where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past cultures to which her tutor answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the Newton's world outlasts her unfortunately cut short life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was infrequently doubted. What was discussed, particularly in the initial period, were his reservations about the effectiveness of theatre: something he regularly discussed in discussions. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a ongoing observation on finance, matrimony, morals, class, the fall of the nobility and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a number of works that deal to great effect with the violation of civil liberties by dictatorial regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly declared crazy and imprisoned in a room with an real lunatic who believes himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the full orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the brutal ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “force is met with wit and strictness with a