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All the finest dramatists extend the frontiers of drama. Beckett and Pinter did it in their own manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric topics – from chaos theory to ethical thought and the enigma of consciousness – and transform them into clever, inventive and frequently emotional dramas. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a great glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Encounter

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely because of Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to present a mini-speech on two radio plays by a at that time obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer ran up an ever escalating taxi bill. 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 emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was impeccably gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the workings of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances leading to our demise. I remember 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 pushing back the silence, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The typical fusion of conceptual boldness and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a big philosophical question: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the focus of a talk being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs of the London Library where he was clutching a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became ever more evident. The breakthrough likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to revival. It raises a plethora of issues such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of individual madness and whether ideas such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense awareness of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and volition, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is intensely moving. Thoughts and emotion perfectly coincide in a segment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past civilizations to which her tutor responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the classical physics survives her unfortunately cut short life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was infrequently challenged. What was debated, especially in the initial period, were his skepticism about the power of theatre: something he frequently 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 shit if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a ongoing observation on wealth, marriage, values, status, the fall of the aristocracy and the rise of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a collection of works that deal to powerful results with the violation of individual freedoms by dictatorial regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident falsely declared insane and imprisoned in a room with an authentic psychiatric patient who imagines himself in command of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the cruel absurdities of communist repression with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “force is met with wit and inflexibility with a