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All the great playwrights push the frontiers of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their distinct fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric subjects – ranging from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the mystery of the mind – and turn them into humorous, imaginative and regularly moving theatrical works. The stage, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a significant embellisher of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Initial Discovery

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to give a brief lecture on two radio plays by a at that time obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer racked up an ever escalating taxi bill. 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 cleverness of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained perfectly polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the workings of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances causing our extinction. I remember 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 pushing back the stillness, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic combination of conceptual boldness and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a significant ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the focus of a lecture being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the a library in London where he was gripping a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly visible. The turning point perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to revival. It raises a multitude of queries such as whether any social obligation is the result of personal instability and whether notions such as justice and national pride exist independent of our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute realization of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, works because it is deeply touching. Thoughts and emotion flawlessly merge in a scene where a gifted youth, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past civilisations to which her instructor replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newton's world endures beyond her tragically cut short life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was rarely doubted. What was discussed, especially in the beginning, were his skepticism 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 the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a running commentary on finance, marriage, values, status, the fall of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a number of works that grapple to significant impact with the violation of civil liberties by oppressive systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic falsely diagnosed insane and confined in a chamber with an genuine psychiatric patient who imagines himself in command of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the entire LSO on stage and to see Stoppard revealing the cruel absurdities of communist repression with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with wit and rigidity with a