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Every one of the finest dramatists extend the frontiers of drama. Beckett and Pinter did it in their own way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure subjects – ranging from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the enigma of the mind – and turn them into witty, inventive and regularly moving theatrical works. Theatre, the actor Olivier noted, is a powerful embellisher of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Early Introduction

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 British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a at that time unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer ran up an skyrocketing cab fare. 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 ingenuity 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 dismissive first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed impeccably gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the nature of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances causing our demise. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the silence, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive fusion of daring ideas and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a big ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an universal, God-given law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the subject of a lecture being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the entrance of the London Library where he was gripping a mound of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the feeling of his plays became ever more visible. The breakthrough perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to revival. It asks a plethora of issues such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of individual madness and whether ideas such as justice and patriotism exist independent of our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened realization of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and volition, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is profoundly touching. Thoughts and sentiment flawlessly merge in a segment where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past cultures to which her tutor replies: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the Newton's world outlasts her tragically truncated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was rarely doubted. What was debated, especially in the initial period, were his skepticism about the efficacy of theatre: something he often talked about in discussions. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a running commentary on money, marriage, values, social class, the decline of the upper class and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a series of works that deal to great effect with the violation of civil liberties by dictatorial systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident falsely diagnosed insane and locked in a cell with an real lunatic who believes himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the brutal ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a