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All the finest dramatists push the frontiers of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their unique manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized themes – from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the enigma of consciousness – and transform them into witty, creative and frequently emotional dramas. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a powerful glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Initial Encounter

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard early on. That was wholly because of Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a short talk on two audio dramas by a then unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer racked up an constantly rising cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was impressed by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained impeccably gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the workings of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we eventually 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 crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances resulting in 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 language is all. The word is pushing back the silence, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The typical fusion of daring ideas and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a big ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether principles adhered to an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the focus of a lecture being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was holding a pile of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly apparent. The turning point likely came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to revival. It asks a whole host of questions such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of individual madness and whether concepts such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute consciousness of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and volition, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is deeply touching. Thoughts and feeling flawlessly coincide in a scene where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, laments the demise of past cultures to which her tutor replies: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her unfortunately cut short life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was infrequently doubted. What was debated, particularly in the initial period, were his reservations about the effectiveness of art: something he often talked about 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 social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a continuous critique on money, matrimony, values, status, the fall of the upper class and the rise of business. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a number of works that engage to great effect with the misuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly diagnosed mad and confined in a chamber with an genuine psychiatric patient who believes himself in control of an symphony. It was startling both to see the whole LSO on the stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the brutal ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a