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Every one of the outstanding playwrights broaden the frontiers of drama. Beckett and Pinter did it in their distinct way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized topics – ranging from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the mystery of consciousness – and turn them into witty, imaginative and regularly emotional dramas. Drama, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a powerful glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Discovery

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he invited me to present a short talk on two audio dramas by a then little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer racked up 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 speaking clock. I was impressed by the cleverness of both plays and got 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 critical opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed exceptionally courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the ways of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances leading to our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the silence, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The typical fusion of daring ideas and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a significant moral issue: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions followed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the subject of a talk being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the London Library where he was clutching a stack of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became ever more visible. The turning point likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to restaging. It poses a whole host of questions such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of personal instability and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist beyond our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute consciousness of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and volition, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is deeply emotional. Thoughts and sentiment perfectly merge in a moment where a gifted youth, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past civilisations to which her tutor replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the Newton's world outlasts her tragically abbreviated life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was seldom challenged. What was debated, particularly in the early years, were his skepticism about the efficacy of drama: something he regularly discussed in interviews. “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 compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a ongoing observation on money, wedlock, values, social class, the weakening of the aristocracy and the rise of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a number of works that deal to great effect with the misuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic incorrectly declared insane and confined in a room with an authentic madman who imagines himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the full LSO on the stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the brutal absurdities of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with irony and strictness with a