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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 ostensibly obscure themes – ranging from chaos theory to ethical thought and the puzzle of awareness – and transform them into humorous, imaginative and frequently touching theatrical works. Drama, the actor Olivier once said, is a powerful embellisher of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Early Encounter

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard early on. That was entirely because of Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to present a short talk on two audio dramas by a back then little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer racked up an skyrocketing cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained impeccably polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the ways of our world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the silence, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive blend of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a big philosophical question: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles obeyed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the topic of a lecture being developed by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was gripping a stack of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With time, the emotional content of his plays became more and more apparent. The breakthrough perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It poses a whole host of questions such as whether any public commitment is the result of individual madness and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense realization of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and free will, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, works because it is deeply emotional. Concepts and emotion flawlessly coincide in a moment where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past civilisations to which her tutor answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the Newton's world survives her sadly truncated life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was infrequently challenged. What was contested, particularly in the initial period, were his reservations about the power of drama: something he regularly discussed in interviews. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To allude subtly 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 presents a running commentary on money, matrimony, values, social class, the weakening of the nobility and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a series of works that engage to significant impact with the misuse of human rights by oppressive governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic wrongly diagnosed mad and locked in a chamber with an genuine psychiatric patient who thinks he is in control of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the cruel absurdities of communist repression with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and strictness with a