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Every one of the outstanding dramatists extend the frontiers of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their own fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure topics – ranging from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the mystery of awareness – and convert them into humorous, inventive and regularly touching dramas. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a significant glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Initial Discovery

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was completely because of Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to present a short talk on two audio dramas by a at that time obscure writer called 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 driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the voice of the time. I was impressed by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed exceptionally gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the ways of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by character and plot. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our end. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the stillness, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The distinctive blend of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a major ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether principles adhered to an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the topic of a lecture being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Breakthrough

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

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became more and more apparent. The key moment likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to restaging. It raises a whole host of issues such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of private derangement and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist beyond our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute consciousness of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and volition, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is deeply moving. Concepts and sentiment flawlessly merge in a segment where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past civilizations to which her instructor replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe outlasts her tragically truncated life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was infrequently doubted. What was discussed, particularly in the beginning, were his reservations about the power of theatre: something he regularly explored in discussions. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social 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 entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a ongoing observation on wealth, marriage, values, social class, the decline of the upper class and the rise of business. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a series of works that deal to great effect with the violation of civil liberties by oppressive systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident incorrectly declared mad and confined in a cell with an real madman who imagines himself in command of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the whole orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the harsh ridiculousness of communist repression with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with wit and strictness with a