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All the great playwrights extend the frontiers of drama. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their unique manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric themes – ranging from chaos theory to ethical thought and the mystery of consciousness – and transform them into humorous, imaginative and regularly moving plays. The stage, the actor Olivier once said, is a powerful glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Initial Encounter

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to give a mini-speech on two radio plays by a back then obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer ran up an ever escalating 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 struck by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was perfectly courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the workings of our world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we later 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 commended for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances causing our demise. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the stillness, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive fusion of daring ideas and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a significant philosophical question: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an universal, God-given law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the focus of a speech being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the London Library where he was holding a mound of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the years, the feeling of his plays became increasingly apparent. The turning point arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to restaging. It poses a whole host of issues such as whether any public commitment is the result of private derangement and whether ideas such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and choice, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is deeply moving. Thoughts and feeling seamlessly merge in a scene where a gifted youth, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past civilisations to which her tutor responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe survives her sadly abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was seldom questioned. What was discussed, especially in the initial period, were his reservations about the effectiveness of drama: something he often explored 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 the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a continuous critique on finance, marriage, ethics, class, the decline of the upper class and the rise of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a collection of works that engage to powerful results with the abuse of civil liberties by authoritarian regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident incorrectly declared crazy and confined in a chamber with an genuine madman who thinks he is in command of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the entire LSO on stage and to see Stoppard revealing the brutal ridiculousness of communist repression with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a