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All the finest dramatists broaden the frontiers of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their own way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure subjects – from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the mystery of consciousness – and transform them into clever, imaginative and regularly moving dramas. Drama, Laurence Olivier once said, is a powerful glamoriser of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Early Introduction

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely due to Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to present a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a at that time little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer ran up an ever escalating taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was perfectly polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the ways of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was always 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 cleverness in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances causing our end. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the quiet, pushing back 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 apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a big ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the focus of a talk being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was clutching a pile of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the feeling of his plays became ever more apparent. The turning point perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to revival. It poses a plethora of issues such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of personal instability and whether ideas such as justice and national pride exist independent of our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened awareness of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is intensely moving. Concepts and sentiment flawlessly merge in a segment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past cultures to which her instructor answers: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the Newton's world outlasts her tragically abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was infrequently doubted. What was debated, particularly in the early years, were his skepticism about the efficacy of drama: something he frequently explored in interviews. “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 the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a running commentary on money, wedlock, values, social class, the fall of the aristocracy and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a number of works that grapple to significant impact with the violation of civil liberties by dictatorial regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly declared mad and confined in a cell with an genuine psychiatric patient who imagines himself in command of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the whole orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard exposing the brutal absurdities of communist repression with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a