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Every one of the finest playwrights broaden the frontiers of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their own manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric themes – from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the enigma of the mind – and transform them into witty, inventive and regularly touching dramas. Theatre, Laurence Olivier noted, is a great glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Discovery

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely due to Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a brief lecture on two radio plays by a at that time little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer racked up an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was perfectly courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the nature of the media.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances leading to our end. 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 word is all. The word is pushing back the silence, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The characteristic combination of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a major moral issue: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles followed an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the focus of a talk being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the London Library where he was gripping a pile of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With time, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly apparent. The key moment arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to revival. It poses a whole host of issues such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of individual madness and whether ideas such as justice and patriotism exist independent of our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense consciousness of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, works because it is intensely touching. Thoughts and emotion seamlessly merge in a scene where a gifted youth, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past civilizations to which her tutor replies: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the Newton's world endures beyond her tragically truncated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was infrequently doubted. What was debated, particularly in the early years, were his reservations about the effectiveness of theatre: something he often discussed in interviews. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a ongoing observation on money, matrimony, values, social class, the weakening of the upper class and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a collection of works that grapple to powerful results with the misuse of civil liberties by oppressive governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident wrongly diagnosed insane and locked in a chamber with an authentic lunatic who thinks he is in command of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the entire LSO on stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the brutal absurdities of communist repression with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a