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Every one of the finest dramatists broaden the frontiers of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their unique fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized topics – from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the mystery of the mind – and convert them into clever, creative and regularly moving plays. The stage, Laurence Olivier noted, is a powerful glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Discovery

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly because of Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to present a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a back then little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer racked up an ever escalating cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed impeccably gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the ways of our world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances causing our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the stillness, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive combination of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a big ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the topic of a speech being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the London Library where he was gripping a stack of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With time, the emotional content of his plays became more and more evident. The key moment 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 public commitment is the outcome of private derangement and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist beyond our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute consciousness of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and volition, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, works because it is intensely moving. Concepts and sentiment flawlessly merge in a scene where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past civilisations to which her teacher answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the Newton's world survives her sadly truncated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was rarely doubted. What was debated, especially in the early years, were his skepticism about the efficacy of drama: something he often talked about 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 avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a continuous critique on wealth, marriage, values, class, the fall of the upper class and the rise of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a series of works that engage to great effect with the abuse of civil liberties by oppressive regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident falsely diagnosed insane and locked in a chamber with an real madman who believes himself in control of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the whole LSO on stage and to see Stoppard revealing the cruel ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with wit and inflexibility with a