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Every one of the finest playwrights broaden the frontiers of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their unique fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric themes – ranging from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the enigma of awareness – and convert them into clever, inventive and often touching dramas. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a great glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Early Discovery

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was completely thanks to Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a short talk on two radio plays by a at that time little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer accumulated an ever escalating taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was impressed by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained exceptionally courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the nature of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by character and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances causing our end. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the quiet, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The typical blend of intellectual audacity and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a significant philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an unchanging, God-given law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the topic of a talk being written 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 pain of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

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

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became ever more evident. The key moment arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to restaging. It asks a whole host of questions such as whether any public commitment is the result of individual madness and whether concepts such as fairness and patriotism exist beyond our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened consciousness of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly touching. Ideas and emotion flawlessly coincide in a segment where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, laments the loss of past cultures to which her tutor replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the Newton's world outlasts her sadly cut short life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was infrequently doubted. What was contested, especially in the beginning, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of drama: something he regularly explored in conversations. “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 qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a continuous critique on finance, marriage, ethics, status, the decline of the aristocracy and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a number of works that grapple to great effect with the violation of individual freedoms by dictatorial governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly declared mad and confined in a room with an genuine lunatic who imagines himself in charge of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the cruel absurdities of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a