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All the outstanding playwrights extend the frontiers of drama. Beckett and Pinter did it in their distinct way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric subjects – from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the mystery of awareness – and convert them into witty, creative and often touching dramas. Theatre, the actor Olivier once said, is a significant embellisher of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Discovery

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly thanks to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to present a short talk on two broadcast plays by a back then obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer racked up an constantly rising cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was exceptionally gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the nature of the media.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its cleverness 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 random circumstances causing our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the quiet, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The typical fusion of daring ideas and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a significant ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles followed an universal, God-given law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the topic of a lecture being developed by the play’s main character, 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 perils of a collapsing society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the London Library where he was gripping a pile of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly evident. The turning point perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to revival. It raises a whole host of issues such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of individual madness and whether concepts such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute awareness of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and volition, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, works because it is profoundly emotional. Ideas and feeling flawlessly merge in a segment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past civilisations to which her tutor replies: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her tragically truncated life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was seldom questioned. What was contested, particularly in the beginning, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of drama: something he often talked about in interviews. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or 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 totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a running commentary on finance, wedlock, values, status, the decline of the upper class and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a series of works that deal to great effect with the violation of individual freedoms by oppressive governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic incorrectly pronounced crazy and locked in a cell with an genuine madman who believes himself in command of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the harsh illogicalities of communist repression with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and strictness with a