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Every one of the finest playwrights extend the frontiers of drama. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their unique way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized topics – from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the puzzle of awareness – and transform them into witty, inventive and frequently touching dramas. Theatre, the actor Olivier once said, is a great glamorizer of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Early Encounter

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard early on. That was wholly due to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a short talk on two broadcast plays by a back then little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer ran up an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was impeccably polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the workings of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances causing our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling 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 typical blend of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a significant philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether principles adhered to an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the subject of a talk being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the a library in London where he was holding a stack of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became ever more evident. The breakthrough likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to revival. It asks a whole host of issues such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of individual madness and whether concepts such as fairness and national pride exist beyond our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened awareness of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is intensely emotional. Thoughts and emotion seamlessly coincide in a scene where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past civilizations to which her tutor responds: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the classical physics endures beyond her sadly cut short life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was infrequently doubted. What was contested, notably in the early years, were his reservations about the power of theatre: something he often discussed in discussions. “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 Vietnam or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a continuous critique on money, matrimony, morals, social class, the fall of the upper class and the rise of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a collection of works that engage to great effect with the abuse of human rights by oppressive systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident falsely diagnosed mad and confined in a cell with an real psychiatric patient who believes himself in command of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the whole LSO on the stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the brutal ridiculousness of communist repression with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a