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All the outstanding playwrights extend the frontiers of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their own fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric themes – from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the puzzle of consciousness – and convert them into clever, inventive and regularly moving dramas. The stage, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a great glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Encounter

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard early on. That was entirely due to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he invited me to give a short talk on two radio plays by a at that time obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer ran up 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 speaking clock. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained perfectly gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the ways of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the quiet, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The typical combination of daring ideas and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a big philosophical question: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions followed an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the focus of a lecture being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the London Library where he was clutching a stack of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became more and more apparent. The key moment likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It poses a whole host of questions such as whether any civic duty is the result of private derangement and whether concepts such as justice and national pride exist independent of our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense realization of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and free will, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is profoundly emotional. Ideas and feeling perfectly coincide in a segment where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, laments the loss of past civilizations to which her tutor answers: “Scientific insights caught sight of and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the classical physics outlasts her unfortunately cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was seldom doubted. What was contested, notably in the early years, were his reservations about the efficacy of drama: something he frequently explored 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 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 meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a ongoing observation on wealth, matrimony, values, status, the fall of the upper class and the dominance of business. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a collection of works that grapple to significant impact with the misuse of human rights by authoritarian governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic wrongly diagnosed mad and confined in a cell with an genuine psychiatric patient who thinks he is in command of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the whole orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the brutal absurdities of communist repression with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a