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All the great dramatists extend the frontiers of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their unique manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric subjects – ranging from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the enigma of awareness – and transform them into humorous, creative and regularly touching dramas. Theatre, the actor Olivier remarked, is a powerful glamoriser of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Early Discovery

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly because of a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to give a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a then little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer ran up an constantly rising taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was exceptionally polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the workings of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances leading to our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the quiet, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive fusion of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a significant moral issue: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions followed an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the topic of a lecture being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the London Library where he was gripping a stack of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly visible. The turning point arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to reproduction. It asks a multitude of questions such as whether any public commitment is the result of private derangement and whether ideas such as justice and national pride exist independent of our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened realization of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and free will, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is intensely touching. Concepts and emotion perfectly coincide in a segment where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past civilizations to which her tutor responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the Newton's world outlasts her unfortunately cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was seldom doubted. What was discussed, notably in the initial period, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of theatre: something he often discussed in conversations. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a ongoing observation on finance, marriage, ethics, status, the decline of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a series of works that deal to great effect with the violation of human rights by authoritarian systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident falsely declared mad and confined in a cell with an genuine psychiatric patient who imagines himself in command of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the entire LSO on the stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the harsh absurdities of communist repression with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with wit and rigidity with a