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All the finest playwrights extend the frontiers of drama. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their own fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric subjects – from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the puzzle of awareness – and transform them into humorous, creative and frequently emotional dramas. Drama, the actor Olivier remarked, is a great glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Early Discovery

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was completely due to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to present a short talk on two audio dramas by a then little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer racked up an constantly rising cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained perfectly polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the workings of our world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by character and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances resulting in our demise. 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 beating back the silence, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive combination of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a significant philosophical question: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether principles adhered to an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the focus of a talk being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the London Library where he was holding a stack of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With time, the emotional content of his plays became more and more visible. The turning point perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It asks a plethora of queries such as whether any civic duty is the result of private derangement and whether concepts such as justice and national pride exist beyond our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened realization of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and volition, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, works because it is deeply touching. Thoughts and feeling perfectly come together in a segment where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past cultures to which her tutor answers: “Scientific insights caught sight of and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the Newton's world endures beyond her sadly abbreviated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was infrequently questioned. What was discussed, particularly in the beginning, were his doubts about the efficacy of drama: something he frequently explored in conversations. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a ongoing observation on wealth, marriage, ethics, status, the decline of the aristocracy and the dominance of business. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a series of works that engage to great effect with the abuse of human rights by dictatorial systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic falsely pronounced insane and imprisoned in a cell with an real lunatic who believes himself in control of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the entire LSO on stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the brutal absurdities of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and strictness with a