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All the outstanding playwrights extend the frontiers of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their own manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure themes – from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of consciousness – and turn them into clever, imaginative and often moving plays. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a powerful glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Early Encounter

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly due to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he asked me to present a brief lecture on two radio plays by a then obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer ran up an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed perfectly polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the nature of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed 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 stillness, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The typical blend of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a major ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the topic of a lecture being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the London Library where he was gripping a stack of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With time, the feeling of his plays became increasingly apparent. The key moment likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to reproduction. It asks a multitude of questions such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of individual madness and whether concepts such as justice and patriotism exist independent of our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute consciousness of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and free will, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly emotional. Thoughts and emotion perfectly merge in a segment where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past civilizations to which her teacher replies: “Scientific insights glimpsed and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the Newton's world survives her tragically truncated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was seldom challenged. What was contested, notably in the initial period, were his doubts about the efficacy of theatre: something he frequently talked about in interviews. “I used to feel alone,” 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], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a continuous critique on finance, wedlock, morals, class, the decline of the upper class and the dominance of business. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a series of works that engage to significant impact with the misuse of individual freedoms by oppressive governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident incorrectly declared crazy and confined in a chamber with an genuine lunatic who imagines himself in control of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the entire orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard exposing the harsh illogicalities of communist repression with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “force is met with wit and inflexibility with a