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Every one of the outstanding dramatists push the frontiers of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their unique fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized subjects – from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the enigma of consciousness – and convert them into humorous, inventive and regularly moving dramas. Drama, the actor Olivier noted, is a great embellisher of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Early Discovery

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard early on. That was completely because of Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a short talk on two audio dramas by a then unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer accumulated an ever escalating taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the voice of the time. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was impeccably courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the workings of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances causing our extinction. 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 resisting the stillness, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive combination of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a significant ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles followed an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the subject of a lecture being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was holding a mound of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became ever more apparent. The breakthrough likely came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to restaging. It poses a multitude of questions such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of private derangement and whether ideas such as justice and patriotism exist beyond our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute awareness of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and choice, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is intensely emotional. Thoughts and feeling flawlessly merge in a scene where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past cultures to which her instructor replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her tragically abbreviated life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was seldom questioned. What was discussed, especially in the early years, were his doubts about the power of theatre: something he often discussed in conversations. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a ongoing observation on money, wedlock, ethics, status, the decline of the upper class and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a series of works that engage to great effect with the violation of individual freedoms by dictatorial systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist falsely diagnosed mad and confined in a chamber with an authentic lunatic who thinks he is in command of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the brutal illogicalities of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with wit and rigidity with a