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All the finest playwrights extend the frontiers of theatre. Beckett and Pinter did it in their unique way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure subjects – from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the enigma of awareness – and convert them into humorous, creative and frequently touching plays. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a significant glamoriser of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Discovery

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard early on. That was completely because of Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to present a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a back then obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer accumulated an ever escalating taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained perfectly gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the workings of our world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we finally 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 brilliance in creating a drama out of two peripheral 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 acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the quiet, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The typical combination of daring ideas and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a significant philosophical question: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your average 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 understood that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the a library in London where he was gripping a mound of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became ever more evident. The key moment perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to revival. It poses a whole host of issues such as whether any civic duty is the result of individual madness and whether ideas such as justice and patriotism exist outside our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense consciousness of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and free will, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a host of other things, works because it is intensely moving. Concepts and sentiment seamlessly come together in a scene where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past cultures to which her instructor replies: “Scientific insights caught sight of and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the Newton's world outlasts her tragically abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was infrequently doubted. What was discussed, notably in the early years, were his reservations about the effectiveness of drama: something he often discussed in discussions. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a continuous critique on wealth, wedlock, ethics, status, the fall of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a collection of works that grapple to significant impact with the misuse of human rights by dictatorial governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident incorrectly pronounced mad and confined in a chamber with an genuine psychiatric patient who thinks he is in command of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the whole orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the cruel illogicalities of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a