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Every one of the great dramatists push the frontiers of drama. Beckett and Pinter did it in their unique manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized themes – ranging from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the enigma of awareness – and transform them into clever, inventive and frequently touching plays. The stage, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a powerful glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Early Discovery

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly because of Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to give a short talk on two audio dramas by a at that time obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer ran up an constantly rising 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 voice of the time. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and eventually met 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 sniffy opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained exceptionally polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the nature of our world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances causing our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The distinctive blend of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a significant moral issue: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions followed an universal, God-given law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the subject of a talk being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance 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 responded.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became ever more evident. The turning point perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to restaging. It raises a plethora of queries such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of private derangement and whether concepts such as justice and patriotism exist beyond our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened consciousness of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is deeply touching. Ideas and feeling seamlessly come together in a scene where a gifted youth, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past civilisations to which her tutor answers: “Scientific insights seen briefly and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the Newton's world endures beyond her tragically cut short life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was infrequently doubted. What was debated, especially in the early years, were his reservations about the effectiveness of drama: something he often discussed 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 housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a continuous critique on money, matrimony, ethics, class, the fall of the aristocracy and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a number of works that grapple to significant impact with the violation of civil liberties by oppressive regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident wrongly pronounced crazy and confined in a room with an authentic madman who imagines himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the cruel absurdities of communist repression with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a