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All the outstanding playwrights push the frontiers of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their own manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized subjects – from chaos theory to ethical thought and the enigma of awareness – and convert them into humorous, inventive and frequently touching dramas. The stage, Laurence Olivier once said, is a great embellisher of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Discovery

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to present a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a back then obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer accumulated an ever escalating taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was perfectly courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the workings of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by character and storyline. 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 depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the quiet, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The typical blend of conceptual boldness and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a significant moral issue: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an absolute, God-given law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the topic of a speech being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs 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 key moment perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It poses a plethora of queries such as whether any civic duty is the result of individual madness and whether concepts such as fairness and national pride exist beyond our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense awareness of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and volition, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, works because it is profoundly touching. Concepts and sentiment flawlessly coincide in a segment where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past cultures to which her teacher answers: “Scientific insights glimpsed and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the Newton's world survives her sadly truncated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was rarely challenged. What was contested, especially in the beginning, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of art: something he regularly talked about in conversations. “I used to feel isolated,” 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 hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a running commentary on wealth, marriage, morals, status, the weakening of the aristocracy and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a collection of works that engage to great effect with the misuse of human rights by oppressive systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic wrongly declared mad and imprisoned in a room with an genuine madman who imagines himself in charge of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the full orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the harsh ridiculousness of communist repression with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with irony and strictness with a