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Every one of the outstanding dramatists push the boundaries of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their own way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized topics – ranging from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the mystery of awareness – and transform them into clever, inventive and regularly emotional plays. The stage, the actor Olivier once said, is a powerful embellisher of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Early Encounter

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely because of Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a back then unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer ran up an skyrocketing cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was impressed by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It speaks volumes 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 now love – he was perfectly courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the ways of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances causing our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the stillness, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic blend of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a major philosophical question: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the focus of a talk being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a previous agriculture minister 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 viewers were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the London Library where he was holding 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 turning point arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It raises a whole host of issues such as whether any public commitment is the result of personal instability and whether notions such as justice and national pride exist independent of our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute consciousness of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and choice, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, works because it is deeply emotional. Thoughts and sentiment seamlessly coincide in a segment where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, laments the demise of past civilisations to which her instructor answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the Newton's world survives her tragically truncated life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was seldom questioned. What was debated, particularly in the beginning, were his doubts about the effectiveness of art: something he often talked about in conversations. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a ongoing observation on wealth, matrimony, values, social class, the decline of the upper class and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a series of works that engage to significant impact with the misuse of civil liberties by dictatorial regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident incorrectly declared insane and imprisoned in a cell with an genuine madman who believes himself in control of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard exposing the brutal absurdities of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a