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All the outstanding dramatists extend the frontiers of theatre. Beckett and Pinter did it in their unique way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure subjects – from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the puzzle of the mind – and turn them into clever, inventive and frequently emotional theatrical works. The stage, the actor Olivier remarked, is a significant glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Early Encounter

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly thanks to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a mini-speech on two radio plays by a back then unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer racked up an ever escalating taxi-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 ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was exceptionally gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the workings of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “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 characteristic blend of daring ideas and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a significant ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the topic of a lecture being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the a library in London where he was gripping a mound of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With time, the feeling of his plays became ever more apparent. The breakthrough arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to reproduction. It poses a whole host of questions such as whether any social obligation is the result of personal instability and whether concepts such as justice and national pride exist independent of our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense consciousness of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and volition, classicism and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly touching. Ideas and feeling flawlessly coincide in a moment where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past civilizations to which her tutor answers: “Scientific insights seen briefly and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe outlasts her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was infrequently questioned. What was contested, notably in the initial period, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of art: something he often talked about in interviews. “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 important but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a ongoing observation on money, marriage, ethics, social class, the decline of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a series of works that deal to significant impact with the abuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident falsely diagnosed insane and confined in a cell with an authentic psychiatric patient who imagines himself in control of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the brutal ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a