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All the outstanding playwrights extend the frontiers of drama. Beckett and Pinter did it in their unique fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric themes – ranging from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of the mind – and turn them into witty, imaginative and regularly emotional dramas. The stage, the actor Olivier once said, is a powerful glamorizer of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Early Encounter

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard early on. That was completely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to present a short talk on two audio dramas by a back then little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer accumulated an ever escalating cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed impeccably gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the ways of our world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances leading to our demise. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the quiet, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The characteristic blend of conceptual boldness and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a major ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the topic of a speech being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared 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, encountering him on the stairs of the London Library where he was gripping a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With time, the feeling of his plays became increasingly evident. The key moment perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to reproduction. It poses a whole host of issues such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of personal instability and whether notions such as justice and patriotism exist independent of our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened awareness of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and volition, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is deeply emotional. Concepts and feeling seamlessly merge in a segment where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past cultures to which her tutor replies: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her tragically cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was infrequently doubted. What was debated, notably in the beginning, were his skepticism about the power of theatre: something he often 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 bad person if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a continuous critique on money, marriage, values, status, the weakening of the upper class and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a series of works that deal to significant impact with the misuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic wrongly diagnosed insane and locked in a room with an genuine madman who thinks he is in command of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the entire LSO on stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the brutal ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with irony and rigidity with a