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All the great dramatists broaden the frontiers of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their unique fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized topics – from chaos theory to ethical thought and the mystery of consciousness – and transform them into clever, inventive and frequently touching dramas. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a significant embellisher of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Early Discovery

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely due to Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to present a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a then unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer ran up an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed impeccably polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the nature of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances resulting in our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the quiet, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic combination of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a big ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether principles obeyed an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the focus of a speech being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was holding a mound of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With time, the feeling of his plays became ever more evident. The breakthrough arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to restaging. It raises a multitude of issues such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of individual madness and whether ideas such as justice and national pride exist independent of our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense awareness of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and volition, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, works because it is deeply moving. Ideas and emotion perfectly merge in a moment where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, laments the loss of past civilisations to which her teacher responds: “Scientific insights caught sight of and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the classical physics outlasts her sadly cut short life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was seldom questioned. What was discussed, notably in the early years, were his reservations about the power of drama: something he often explored 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 housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a continuous critique on finance, matrimony, values, status, the fall of the upper class and the dominance of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a series of works that engage to significant impact with the misuse of civil liberties by oppressive governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident falsely declared crazy and confined in a room with an real lunatic who imagines himself in command of an symphony. It was startling both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the harsh absurdities of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a