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All the great dramatists extend the frontiers of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their unique fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure subjects – from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the puzzle of awareness – and convert them into clever, imaginative and often moving theatrical works. The stage, the actor Olivier once said, is a powerful glamoriser of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Initial Encounter

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard early on. That was completely due to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to give a short talk on two audio dramas by a at that time little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer racked up an constantly rising taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was impressed by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was impeccably courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the nature of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the stillness, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic fusion of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a significant philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the subject of a speech being developed by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the London Library where he was holding a pile of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With time, the feeling of his plays became ever more apparent. The turning point perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to revival. It asks a multitude of queries such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of private derangement and whether notions such as justice and national pride exist independent of our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened realization of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and volition, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is intensely moving. Ideas and emotion perfectly merge in a moment where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past civilisations to which her tutor responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newton's world outlasts her tragically abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was seldom doubted. What was debated, particularly in the early years, were his doubts about the efficacy of theatre: something he frequently discussed 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 refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a continuous critique on money, wedlock, ethics, status, the decline of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a number of works that engage to powerful results with the violation of civil liberties by authoritarian regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident incorrectly pronounced crazy and confined in a cell with an authentic psychiatric patient who imagines himself in control of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the full orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the cruel ridiculousness of communist repression with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “force is met with irony and inflexibility with a