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Every one of the finest dramatists extend the frontiers of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their distinct way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized subjects – ranging from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the mystery of awareness – and turn them into witty, imaginative and often emotional dramas. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a great glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Discovery

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely because of a man named Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to give a mini-speech on two radio plays by a at that time obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer accumulated an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was impeccably courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the workings of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the silence, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The characteristic combination of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a major moral issue: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an absolute, God-given law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the topic of a lecture being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was holding a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became more and more visible. The key moment arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to restaging. It asks a multitude of questions such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of individual madness and whether ideas such as justice and national pride exist beyond our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute awareness of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly emotional. Thoughts and sentiment perfectly coincide in a segment where a gifted youth, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past civilizations to which her instructor replies: “Scientific insights seen briefly and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the classical physics outlasts her sadly cut short life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was infrequently questioned. What was debated, notably in the initial period, were his doubts about the effectiveness of drama: something he often talked about in discussions. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person 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], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a running commentary on wealth, marriage, ethics, social class, the fall of the nobility and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a number of works that engage to great effect with the misuse of civil liberties by authoritarian governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist falsely declared insane and locked in a room with an authentic lunatic who thinks he is in charge of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the full LSO on the stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the brutal illogicalities of communist repression with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a