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Every one of the outstanding playwrights push the frontiers of drama. Beckett and Pinter did it in their unique way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure subjects – from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the mystery of awareness – and convert them into witty, imaginative and often touching dramas. Drama, Laurence Olivier noted, is a significant glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Initial Discovery

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly thanks to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to give a brief lecture on two radio plays by a then obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer ran up an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in If You’re 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 cleverness of both plays and eventually met their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed perfectly gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the ways of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The typical blend of daring ideas and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a significant ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the subject of a speech being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the London Library where he was holding a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly evident. The key moment arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to revival. It raises a whole host of issues such as whether any public commitment is the result of private derangement and whether notions such as justice and patriotism exist beyond our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened realization of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and free will, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, works because it is profoundly touching. Ideas and feeling flawlessly coincide in a moment where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past civilizations to which her instructor replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newtonian universe survives her tragically abbreviated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was seldom challenged. What was debated, notably in the beginning, were his reservations about the effectiveness of drama: something he frequently discussed in conversations. “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 the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a running commentary on money, wedlock, values, status, the fall of the upper class and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a number of works that engage to great effect with the abuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist falsely declared crazy and confined in a cell with an genuine psychiatric patient who imagines himself in charge of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the full LSO on the stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the harsh illogicalities of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a