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All the outstanding dramatists extend the frontiers of theatre. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their unique fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized themes – ranging from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the enigma of awareness – and transform them into clever, imaginative and regularly emotional dramas. Theatre, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a powerful glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Initial Encounter

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard early on. That was wholly thanks to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a short talk on two audio dramas by a at that time obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer ran up an skyrocketing cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained exceptionally gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the workings of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had acted 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 stillness, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive fusion of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a significant philosophical question: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the subject of a speech being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the London Library where he was gripping a pile of books that reached 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 more and more apparent. The key moment perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to restaging. It poses a whole host of issues such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of personal instability and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute realization of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is profoundly moving. Ideas and sentiment seamlessly merge in a segment where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past civilizations to which her instructor answers: “Scientific insights seen briefly and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the classical physics endures beyond her tragically cut short life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was infrequently doubted. What was debated, particularly in the initial period, were his doubts about the efficacy of theatre: something he regularly talked about in discussions. “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 avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a ongoing observation on wealth, matrimony, ethics, status, the decline of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a series of works that engage to significant impact with the violation of human rights by oppressive systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic incorrectly declared crazy and locked in a room with an authentic lunatic who imagines himself in command of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the entire orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the brutal illogicalities of communist repression with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with wit and strictness with a