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All the great dramatists extend the frontiers of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their unique fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized topics – from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the mystery of awareness – and transform them into clever, imaginative and regularly moving plays. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a significant glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Initial Encounter

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was completely because of Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to present a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a back then little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer accumulated an ever escalating 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 struck by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was perfectly courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the ways of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all prey 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 dialogue is all. The word is beating back the quiet, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The distinctive blend of daring ideas and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a major philosophical question: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the subject of a speech being written by the play’s main character, 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 perils of a collapsing society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was gripping a mound of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With time, the feeling of his plays became more and more apparent. The breakthrough likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to reproduction. It asks a multitude of issues such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of individual madness and whether ideas such as justice and national pride exist outside our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute realization of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly moving. Concepts and feeling perfectly come together in a moment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past civilisations to which her teacher answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the Newton's world endures beyond her sadly abbreviated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was infrequently challenged. What was discussed, especially in the beginning, were his reservations about the efficacy of drama: something he regularly discussed in discussions. “I used to feel alone,” 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 qualms 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 totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a continuous critique on finance, wedlock, ethics, social class, the fall of the aristocracy and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a collection of works that grapple to significant impact with the abuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly pronounced mad and locked in a chamber with an real lunatic who imagines himself in charge of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the entire orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the brutal ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with irony and rigidity with a