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All the outstanding playwrights broaden the frontiers of drama. Beckett and Pinter did it in their own fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized topics – from chaos theory to ethical thought and the enigma of awareness – and transform them into clever, creative and often emotional plays. The stage, the actor Olivier noted, is a powerful glamoriser of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Discovery

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was completely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a short talk on two audio dramas by a then little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer accumulated an constantly rising taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained exceptionally courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the nature of our world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances causing our end. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the stillness, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The typical fusion of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a significant moral issue: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the focus of a talk being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was holding a mound of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became ever more apparent. The turning point likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to restaging. It raises a plethora of issues such as whether any civic duty is the result of personal instability and whether concepts such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense awareness of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and choice, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, functions because it is profoundly emotional. Thoughts and sentiment perfectly merge in a scene where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, laments the loss of past civilizations to which her tutor replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the classical physics endures beyond her tragically truncated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was seldom doubted. What was discussed, particularly in the beginning, were his doubts about the power of theatre: something he often discussed in interviews. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a running commentary on finance, matrimony, morals, class, the weakening of the upper class and the rise of business. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a collection of works that grapple to powerful results with the violation of individual freedoms by dictatorial governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic incorrectly declared mad and imprisoned in a room with an real psychiatric patient who thinks he is in command of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the harsh absurdities of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with irony and rigidity with a