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All the great playwrights extend the frontiers of drama. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their distinct manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure subjects – ranging from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the mystery of consciousness – and turn them into humorous, creative and frequently moving plays. Theatre, the actor Olivier remarked, is a powerful embellisher of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Initial Discovery

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard early on. That was wholly thanks to Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he requested that I to give a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a at that time little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer accumulated an ever escalating taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was impeccably gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the ways of our world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances causing our end. I remember John Wood, who had acted 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, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive fusion of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a significant philosophical question: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an absolute, God-given law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the subject of a talk being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the London Library where he was gripping a mound of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became more and more apparent. The breakthrough arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to revival. It raises a whole host of questions such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of personal instability and whether concepts such as justice and patriotism exist outside our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute consciousness of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and choice, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is intensely touching. Concepts and sentiment flawlessly merge in a segment where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past civilizations to which her teacher responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the classical physics survives her tragically cut short life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was infrequently doubted. What was discussed, particularly in the initial period, were his reservations about the efficacy of art: something he frequently discussed 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 the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a continuous critique on finance, marriage, ethics, class, the fall of the aristocracy and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a number of works that grapple to great effect with the violation of human rights by authoritarian regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly declared insane and locked in a cell with an authentic lunatic who thinks he is in control of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the whole LSO on the stage and to see Stoppard exposing the harsh ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with irony and inflexibility with a