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All the finest dramatists broaden the frontiers of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their unique way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure themes – from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the mystery of awareness – and transform them into clever, imaginative and often moving dramas. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a great glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Discovery

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly thanks to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a then obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer racked up an ever escalating taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained perfectly gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the ways of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we in time 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 constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances causing our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the silence, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive blend of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a big moral issue: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions followed an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the topic of a talk being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood 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 Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, just 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 answered.

With the years, the feeling of his plays became increasingly evident. The key moment perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to reproduction. It poses a multitude of questions such as whether any social obligation is the result of personal instability and whether concepts such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute awareness of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and volition, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is deeply emotional. Thoughts and emotion perfectly come together in a scene where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past cultures to which her teacher replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the classical physics survives her sadly cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was rarely challenged. What was discussed, particularly in the early years, were his doubts about the efficacy of drama: something he regularly talked about in conversations. “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 the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a ongoing observation on money, matrimony, ethics, status, the decline of the nobility and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a collection of works that grapple to significant impact with the abuse of civil liberties by dictatorial systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic incorrectly diagnosed mad and locked in a cell with an authentic lunatic who believes himself in command of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the full LSO on the stage and to see Stoppard revealing the harsh ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “force is met with irony and strictness with a