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All the great dramatists push the frontiers of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their distinct fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized themes – ranging from chaos theory to ethical thought and the enigma of awareness – and convert them into witty, inventive and regularly moving plays. Theatre, the actor Olivier once said, is a great glamoriser of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Early Encounter

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely due to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a back then little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer accumulated an constantly rising 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 speaking clock. I was struck by the cleverness 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 premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was impeccably courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the nature of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances causing 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 language is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The typical fusion of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a significant moral issue: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions followed an absolute, God-given law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the subject of a lecture being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Revelation

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

With time, the sentiment of his plays became ever more evident. The key moment likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to revival. It poses a multitude of issues such as whether any civic duty is the result of personal instability and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist beyond our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense realization of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and free will, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, works because it is deeply moving. Concepts and sentiment flawlessly coincide in a moment where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past civilisations to which her teacher replies: “Scientific insights caught sight of and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the Newton's world endures beyond her sadly cut short life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was rarely questioned. What was contested, particularly in the initial period, were his doubts about the efficacy of drama: something he frequently explored in discussions. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a running commentary on wealth, marriage, morals, status, the weakening of the nobility and the rise of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a number of works that engage to great effect with the violation of human rights by dictatorial systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident falsely diagnosed insane and confined in a chamber with an real madman who imagines himself in charge of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the entire orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the cruel illogicalities of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and strictness with a