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Every one of the finest dramatists extend the frontiers of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their unique fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure subjects – from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the enigma of awareness – and transform them into humorous, inventive and often emotional plays. The stage, Laurence Olivier once said, is a great glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Early Encounter

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely thanks to Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to give a short talk on two broadcast plays by a then obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer ran up an skyrocketing cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed exceptionally courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the ways of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances causing our extinction. 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 dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic fusion of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a big moral issue: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles adhered to an unchanging, God-given law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the focus of a speech 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 suffering of a failing marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting 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 answered.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became more and more visible. The turning point perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to restaging. It raises a multitude of issues such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of individual madness and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense realization of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, works because it is deeply touching. Concepts and emotion flawlessly coincide in a scene where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, laments the demise of past civilisations to which her teacher replies: “Scientific insights seen briefly and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the classical physics survives her tragically abbreviated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was infrequently questioned. What was contested, particularly in the early years, were his doubts about the power of drama: something he regularly explored in conversations. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a continuous critique on money, matrimony, morals, class, the fall of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a collection of works that engage to significant impact with the abuse of civil liberties by authoritarian regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly declared mad and confined in a cell with an genuine madman who imagines himself in control of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the full orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the brutal absurdities of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with wit and strictness with a