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Every one of the finest playwrights broaden the frontiers of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their unique manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure themes – from chaos theory to ethical thought and the enigma of the mind – and turn them into clever, inventive and frequently moving theatrical works. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a powerful glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Discovery

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely due to Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to give a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a back then little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer racked up an ever escalating cab fare. 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 speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained impeccably polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the nature of the media.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances leading to our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The typical fusion of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a major ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions followed an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the subject of a talk being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the London Library where he was gripping a pile of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became more and more visible. The key moment perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to reproduction. It asks a multitude of queries such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of private derangement and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is intensely moving. Ideas and sentiment seamlessly come together in a segment where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, laments the demise of past cultures to which her instructor answers: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the classical physics endures beyond her tragically abbreviated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was seldom challenged. What was debated, notably in the initial period, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of art: something he regularly talked about in conversations. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit 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 significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a running commentary on money, matrimony, values, class, the fall of the aristocracy and the dominance of business. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a series of works that grapple to significant impact with the abuse of human rights by authoritarian systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly diagnosed insane and imprisoned in a room with an real lunatic who thinks he is in charge of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the harsh absurdities of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with wit and strictness with a