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All the great playwrights extend the frontiers of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their distinct fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure topics – from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the enigma of awareness – and convert them into clever, imaginative and frequently emotional dramas. The stage, Laurence Olivier once said, is a great glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability 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, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to give a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a at that time little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer racked up an constantly rising taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed 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 appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was impeccably polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the workings of our world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances leading to our demise. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the quiet, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The characteristic combination of daring ideas and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a major philosophical question: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether principles obeyed an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the subject of a lecture being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the London Library where he was holding a mound of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became ever more evident. The key moment likely came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to revival. It poses a multitude of issues such as whether any civic duty is the result of personal instability and whether ideas such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened consciousness of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and choice, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is deeply emotional. Ideas and emotion perfectly merge in a scene where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past civilisations to which her instructor replies: “Scientific insights glimpsed and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the classical physics outlasts her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was seldom challenged. What was contested, particularly in the initial period, were his reservations about the effectiveness of art: something he often talked about in conversations. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a ongoing observation on finance, marriage, ethics, status, the weakening of the aristocracy and the rise of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a series of works that grapple to significant impact with the misuse of human rights by dictatorial regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist falsely pronounced crazy and locked in a chamber with an genuine madman who believes himself in charge of an symphony. It was startling both to see the entire orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the brutal absurdities of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a