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All the outstanding dramatists extend the frontiers of theatre. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their unique manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric topics – from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the puzzle of the mind – and turn them into clever, imaginative and often emotional theatrical works. Drama, the actor Olivier noted, is a powerful embellisher of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Initial Discovery

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly because of a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to present a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a then little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer ran up an constantly rising cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed impeccably gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the ways of our world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The typical blend of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a major philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the topic of a lecture being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was gripping a mound of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly evident. The breakthrough likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to reproduction. It asks a plethora of queries such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of private derangement and whether concepts such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense realization of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and volition, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is intensely touching. Thoughts and feeling perfectly merge in a moment where a gifted youth, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past civilizations to which her instructor answers: “Scientific insights caught sight of and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the classical physics endures beyond her unfortunately truncated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was infrequently doubted. What was contested, notably in the early years, were his reservations about the power of drama: something he frequently talked about in conversations. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit 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], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a running commentary on finance, matrimony, values, class, the decline of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a series of works that engage to significant impact with the abuse of individual freedoms by authoritarian governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident falsely declared mad and locked in a room with an genuine psychiatric patient who thinks he is in charge of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the full orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the cruel illogicalities of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with wit and strictness with a