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Every one of the great dramatists broaden the frontiers of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their own way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure topics – from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of consciousness – and transform them into clever, inventive and regularly moving theatrical works. Theatre, the actor Olivier once said, is a significant embellisher of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Early Encounter

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard early on. That was wholly thanks to Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a then little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer ran up an ever escalating cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the cleverness 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 gone on television in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed impeccably courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the nature of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the stillness, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The characteristic blend of intellectual audacity and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a major ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules followed an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the topic of a speech being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was holding a pile of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became ever more visible. The breakthrough arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to restaging. It raises a plethora of issues such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of individual madness and whether ideas such as justice and national pride exist independent of our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened awareness of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and volition, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is intensely moving. Thoughts and sentiment perfectly coincide in a segment where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past civilizations to which her teacher replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the Newton's world survives her sadly cut short life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was infrequently doubted. What was debated, notably in the early years, were his reservations about the power of art: something he regularly discussed in conversations. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a continuous critique on wealth, matrimony, ethics, status, the fall of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a collection of works that deal to powerful results with the abuse of human rights by oppressive governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly pronounced insane and locked in a chamber with an real madman who imagines himself in charge of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard revealing the cruel illogicalities of communist repression with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and strictness with a