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Every one of the great dramatists extend the frontiers of drama. Beckett and Pinter did it in their own way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized topics – ranging from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the enigma of consciousness – and turn them into clever, creative and frequently moving dramas. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a powerful glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Initial Discovery

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard early on. That was entirely because of a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a then obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer accumulated an constantly rising taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity 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 remained impeccably courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the nature of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we finally 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 constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances leading to 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 language is all. The word is resisting the quiet, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic blend of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a big philosophical question: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the focus of a speech being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs 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 responded.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became ever more evident. The key moment perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to reproduction. It asks a whole host of issues such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of personal instability and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened consciousness of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and free will, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly moving. Thoughts and emotion flawlessly come together in a segment where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past civilisations to which her teacher replies: “Scientific insights glimpsed and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newtonian universe outlasts her tragically truncated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was seldom challenged. What was debated, notably in the beginning, were his skepticism about the power of drama: something he often explored in discussions. “I used to feel alone,” 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 qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a running commentary on finance, matrimony, values, status, the decline of the aristocracy and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a collection of works that engage to great effect with the violation of civil liberties by dictatorial systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident wrongly pronounced mad and locked in a chamber with an real psychiatric patient who thinks he is in charge of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the full orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the cruel illogicalities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with wit and rigidity with a