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All the great dramatists broaden the frontiers of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their unique fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric subjects – from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the enigma of awareness – and transform them into clever, inventive and regularly emotional plays. Drama, Laurence Olivier noted, is a powerful glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Encounter

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly due to Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to present a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a then unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer ran up an constantly rising cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained perfectly gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the ways of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances resulting in our end. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, beating back the darkness … 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 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a significant ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the topic of a lecture being developed by the play’s protagonist, 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 perils of a unraveling society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the entrance 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 feeling of his plays became more and more evident. The key moment perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to revival. It poses a whole host of issues such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of private derangement and whether concepts such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense realization of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and free will, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is deeply touching. Thoughts and feeling seamlessly coincide in a segment where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past civilizations to which her teacher responds: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the Newtonian universe survives her tragically cut short life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was rarely doubted. What was contested, notably in the early years, were his skepticism about the efficacy of art: something he frequently discussed in discussions. “I used to feel isolated,” 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 hesitation about that. To avert indirectly 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 presents a continuous critique on wealth, wedlock, values, social class, the fall of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a collection of works that deal to great effect with the abuse of civil liberties by oppressive governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly diagnosed crazy and locked in a room with an authentic psychiatric patient who thinks he is in command of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the whole orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the brutal absurdities of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with irony and inflexibility with a