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All the outstanding playwrights push the frontiers of drama. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their distinct fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure subjects – from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of consciousness – and convert them into clever, creative and often emotional plays. The stage, the actor Olivier remarked, is a significant glamorizer of intellect. 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 entirely because of a man named Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to give a short talk on two radio plays by a back then obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer racked up an ever escalating cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed perfectly gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the ways of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by character and plot. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances leading to our end. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The typical combination of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a major philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the focus of a lecture being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was holding a mound of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly evident. The key moment likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to revival. It raises a whole host of queries such as whether any social obligation is the result of private derangement and whether notions such as justice and national pride exist independent of our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and free will, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, works because it is deeply moving. Ideas and feeling flawlessly merge in a moment where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past cultures to which her instructor answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe survives her sadly abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was seldom doubted. What was debated, notably in the early years, were his reservations about the efficacy of art: something he regularly discussed in interviews. “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 Vietnam or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a continuous critique on money, marriage, morals, social class, the decline of the upper class and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a collection of works that engage to powerful results with the misuse of human rights by authoritarian regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident incorrectly pronounced crazy and imprisoned in a cell with an authentic psychiatric patient who imagines himself in command of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the whole orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the brutal ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “force is met with wit and inflexibility with a