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Every one of the great playwrights extend the frontiers of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their own fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized topics – from chaos theory to ethical thought and the mystery of consciousness – and convert them into witty, inventive and often touching dramas. Drama, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a powerful glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Discovery

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely due to Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a then unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer racked up an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained perfectly gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the workings of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances causing our demise. 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 language is all. The word is resisting the silence, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive combination of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a major philosophical question: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether principles obeyed an universal, God-given law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the focus of a speech being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the anguish of a fractured marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was clutching a pile of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became more and more evident. The turning point perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to revival. It raises a multitude of issues such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of individual madness and whether ideas such as justice and patriotism exist outside our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute awareness of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is intensely moving. Thoughts and emotion seamlessly come together in a moment where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past cultures to which her teacher replies: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the Newtonian universe outlasts her unfortunately cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was rarely doubted. What was discussed, especially in the early years, were his doubts about the efficacy of theatre: something he regularly explored in conversations. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a running commentary on finance, matrimony, ethics, social class, the fall of the aristocracy and the rise of business. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a collection of works that deal to great effect with the violation of civil liberties by dictatorial governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic falsely diagnosed insane and imprisoned in a cell with an genuine madman who believes himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the entire LSO on the stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the brutal ridiculousness of communist repression with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “force is met with wit and rigidity with a