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All the finest playwrights broaden the frontiers of drama. Beckett and Pinter did it in their distinct fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized topics – from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of consciousness – and turn them into humorous, imaginative and often emotional dramas. The stage, the actor Olivier remarked, is a powerful glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Initial Encounter

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely due to Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to give a short talk on two broadcast plays by a then unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer accumulated an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained exceptionally gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the workings of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances causing our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the silence, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The distinctive fusion of daring ideas and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a big philosophical question: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the focus of a talk being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting 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 answered.

With the passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became ever more visible. The turning point perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It poses a multitude of queries such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of individual madness and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist beyond our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense awareness of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and free will, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is intensely moving. Ideas and emotion perfectly come together in a scene where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past civilizations to which her teacher answers: “Scientific insights glimpsed and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the classical physics endures beyond her sadly truncated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was infrequently questioned. What was debated, particularly in the initial period, were his reservations about the effectiveness of art: something he frequently talked about in interviews. “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 housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a ongoing observation on wealth, marriage, morals, status, the weakening of the nobility and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a collection of works that deal to significant impact with the violation of civil liberties by dictatorial regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident wrongly pronounced insane and locked in a room with an authentic madman who thinks he is in charge of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the whole LSO on the stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the harsh absurdities of communist repression with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “force is met with wit and rigidity with a