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All the finest dramatists push the frontiers of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their own manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure topics – from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the mystery of awareness – and transform them into witty, creative and often touching plays. Theatre, the actor Olivier noted, is a significant embellisher of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Early Discovery

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was completely due to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to present a short talk on two radio plays by a at that time obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer accumulated an constantly rising taxi-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 impressed by the ingenuity 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 dismissive premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained impeccably courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the ways of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by character and plot. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the stillness, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive combination of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a major philosophical question: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether principles adhered to an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the focus of a speech being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was clutching a mound of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly evident. The turning point perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It poses a multitude of questions such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of private derangement and whether concepts such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute realization of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and choice, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, works because it is deeply moving. Concepts and sentiment perfectly coincide in a moment where a gifted youth, Thomasina, laments the loss of past civilisations to which her instructor answers: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the classical physics endures beyond her sadly abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was seldom challenged. What was discussed, particularly in the beginning, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of drama: something he frequently explored in interviews. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a running commentary on wealth, matrimony, values, social class, the weakening of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a collection of works that engage to great effect with the misuse of civil liberties by dictatorial regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident incorrectly pronounced crazy and confined in a room with an genuine lunatic who imagines himself in command of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the entire orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the brutal illogicalities of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and strictness with a