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Every one of the outstanding dramatists broaden the frontiers of drama. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their distinct fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized topics – from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the mystery of the mind – and transform them into humorous, inventive and often moving theatrical works. Theatre, the actor Olivier remarked, is a significant embellisher of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Initial Encounter

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard early on. That was wholly due to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to present a brief lecture on two radio plays by a at that time obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer ran up an ever escalating taxi-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 speaking clock. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained impeccably courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the workings of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances leading to our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the silence, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive combination of daring ideas and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a significant moral issue: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the topic of a lecture 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 pain of a failing marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the entrance 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 replied.

With time, the emotional content of his plays became more and more visible. The key moment arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to restaging. It raises a multitude of queries such as whether any public commitment is the result of private derangement and whether ideas such as justice and national pride exist outside our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute realization of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and volition, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is deeply touching. Concepts and sentiment perfectly merge in a moment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past cultures to which her teacher responds: “Scientific insights glimpsed and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the Newtonian universe survives her tragically truncated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was infrequently questioned. What was contested, particularly in the initial period, were his doubts about the power of art: something he often explored 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 Vietnam or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a ongoing observation on finance, wedlock, ethics, class, the decline of the aristocracy and the rise of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a number of works that grapple to significant impact with the misuse of civil liberties by dictatorial regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident incorrectly pronounced insane and confined in a cell with an real madman who imagines himself in command of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the entire LSO on stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the cruel absurdities of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a