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All the finest playwrights push the frontiers of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their unique fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized themes – from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the puzzle of the mind – and turn them into witty, creative and regularly touching plays. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a significant embellisher of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Encounter

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was completely due to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to present a short talk on two broadcast plays by a then unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer ran up an skyrocketing cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained perfectly gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the workings of the media.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by personality and storyline. 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 undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the silence, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive combination of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a major moral issue: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules followed an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the subject of a talk being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was clutching a mound of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became ever more evident. The key moment likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It poses a multitude of issues such as whether any social obligation is the result of private derangement and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist beyond our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense awareness of the joy of love and the pain 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 intensely emotional. Concepts and sentiment perfectly coincide in a scene where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, laments the demise of past civilisations to which her tutor replies: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the classical physics outlasts her tragically abbreviated life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was rarely doubted. What was discussed, especially in the beginning, were his doubts about the power of theatre: something he regularly 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 the Vietnam War 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 entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a running commentary on money, matrimony, morals, status, the decline of the upper class and the dominance of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a number of works that deal to great effect with the misuse of human rights by dictatorial systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic wrongly diagnosed mad and confined in a cell with an authentic lunatic who thinks he is in command of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard revealing the brutal absurdities of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a