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Every one of the great playwrights push the frontiers of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their unique way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized topics – from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the enigma of awareness – and turn them into clever, imaginative and regularly moving theatrical works. The stage, Laurence Olivier noted, is a significant embellisher of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Initial Encounter

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard at an early stage. 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 short talk on two broadcast plays by a back then unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer ran up an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained exceptionally gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the workings of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive combination of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a big moral issue: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an universal, God-given law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the focus of a lecture being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a fractured marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the London Library 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 time, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly evident. The turning point arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to revival. It raises a whole host of queries such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of personal instability and whether ideas such as justice and patriotism exist independent of our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened awareness of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and choice, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, works because it is intensely touching. Concepts and sentiment flawlessly coincide in a moment where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past civilizations to which her teacher answers: “Scientific insights glimpsed and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe survives her tragically abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was infrequently challenged. What was debated, especially in the initial period, were his reservations about the power of art: something he frequently talked about in conversations. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or 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 addresses no major issues.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a running commentary on money, wedlock, morals, class, the fall of the nobility and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a number of works that engage to powerful results with the misuse of individual freedoms by oppressive systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist falsely pronounced mad and confined in a chamber with an real lunatic who believes himself in command of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the whole orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the cruel illogicalities of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with wit and inflexibility with a