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Every one of the outstanding dramatists extend the frontiers of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their distinct fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric themes – from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of awareness – and turn them into humorous, imaginative and often emotional dramas. The stage, the actor Olivier noted, is a significant glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Initial Discovery

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely because of Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to present a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a at that time little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer ran up an constantly rising cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was exceptionally polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the workings of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the silence, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The typical blend of conceptual boldness and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a big philosophical question: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the topic of a talk being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was gripping a stack of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became ever more apparent. The key moment likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to restaging. It poses a whole host of issues such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of private derangement and whether ideas such as justice and patriotism exist independent of our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and volition, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is intensely emotional. Ideas and feeling perfectly come together in a segment where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past civilizations to which her teacher answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the classical physics endures beyond her sadly truncated life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was seldom doubted. What was debated, notably in the beginning, were his skepticism about the efficacy of theatre: something he regularly talked about in interviews. “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 hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a ongoing observation on wealth, marriage, values, class, the fall of the upper class and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a series of works that grapple to great effect with the abuse of civil liberties by authoritarian systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic incorrectly declared mad and locked in a room with an real psychiatric patient who imagines himself in control of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the entire orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the brutal illogicalities of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with wit and inflexibility with a