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Every one of the outstanding playwrights push the frontiers of drama. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their distinct manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure themes – from chaos theory to ethical thought and the mystery of awareness – and transform them into humorous, inventive and frequently emotional plays. Theatre, the actor Olivier noted, is a powerful embellisher of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Initial Discovery

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard early on. That was wholly because of Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me 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 impoverished writer racked up an ever escalating cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained perfectly courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the ways of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of random 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 quiet, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The typical combination of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a big moral issue: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules followed an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the focus of a talk being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the London Library where he was clutching a mound of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became more and more evident. The breakthrough likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to reproduction. It asks a plethora of issues such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of personal instability and whether notions such as justice and national pride exist beyond our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense realization of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, works because it is deeply emotional. Concepts and emotion perfectly come together in a scene where a gifted youth, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past civilizations to which her teacher answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the classical physics outlasts her tragically abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was seldom doubted. What was contested, particularly in the beginning, were his doubts about the effectiveness of drama: something he frequently talked about in conversations. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a continuous critique on finance, matrimony, values, social class, the decline of the aristocracy and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a series of works that engage to significant impact with the misuse of human rights by oppressive systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic wrongly diagnosed crazy and locked in a chamber with an genuine psychiatric patient who imagines himself in command of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the harsh absurdities of communist repression with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with irony and inflexibility with a