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All the outstanding dramatists extend the frontiers of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their distinct fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized topics – from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the puzzle of awareness – and convert them into witty, creative and frequently moving theatrical works. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a powerful embellisher of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Initial Discovery

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly thanks to Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a back then obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer ran up an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver 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 young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was perfectly courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the nature of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances leading to our demise. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The characteristic blend of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a significant philosophical question: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the topic of a speech being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the London Library where he was gripping a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With time, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly evident. The breakthrough arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to restaging. It raises a multitude of issues such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of personal instability and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense awareness of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and choice, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a host of other things, works because it is deeply emotional. Concepts and feeling perfectly merge in a scene where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past cultures to which her instructor answers: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe survives her tragically abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was seldom questioned. What was debated, notably in the beginning, were his doubts about the effectiveness of drama: something he often talked about in conversations. “I used to feel isolated,” 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], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a continuous critique on finance, matrimony, morals, class, the weakening of the nobility and the rise of business. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a number of works that grapple to powerful results with the abuse of human rights by dictatorial governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly declared crazy and imprisoned in a room with an authentic madman who thinks he is in control of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the cruel ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a