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All the outstanding dramatists extend the frontiers of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their distinct manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized themes – from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the enigma of awareness – and transform them into clever, inventive and often touching dramas. The stage, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a significant embellisher of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Initial Discovery

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a mini-speech on two radio plays by a back then obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer ran up an constantly rising taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed impeccably courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the nature of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The distinctive blend of intellectual audacity and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a significant moral issue: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an universal, God-given law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the focus of a lecture being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the London Library where he was holding a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the feeling of his plays became more and more visible. The turning point perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to reproduction. It poses a plethora of queries such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of personal instability and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist outside our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened awareness of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly emotional. Ideas and sentiment flawlessly merge in a segment where a gifted youth, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past civilizations to which her instructor replies: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the Newton's world survives her unfortunately cut short life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was seldom doubted. What was contested, particularly in the initial period, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of theatre: something he often discussed in conversations. “I used to feel out on a limb,” 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 allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a continuous critique on wealth, matrimony, values, status, the decline of the upper class and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a collection of works that grapple to great effect with the abuse of civil liberties by oppressive governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly pronounced crazy and confined in a cell with an real madman who imagines himself in command of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the entire orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard exposing the harsh ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with irony and inflexibility with a