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All the outstanding playwrights extend the boundaries of drama. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their unique fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized subjects – from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the mystery of the mind – and convert them into clever, creative and regularly touching theatrical works. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a significant glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Initial Discovery

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly because of Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to give a short talk on two radio plays by a then little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer ran up an skyrocketing cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed perfectly polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the nature of our world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the silence, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive blend of conceptual boldness and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a significant moral issue: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the focus of a talk being developed 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 pain of a broken marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the a library in London where he was gripping a pile of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly evident. The breakthrough arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to revival. It asks a whole host of questions such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of private derangement and whether ideas such as justice and national pride exist independent of our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened realization of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is intensely emotional. Thoughts and sentiment seamlessly coincide in a moment where a gifted youth, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past cultures to which her teacher responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the classical physics outlasts her sadly truncated life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was seldom challenged. What was debated, particularly in the early years, were his reservations about the power of art: something he regularly discussed in discussions. “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 social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a running commentary on wealth, marriage, ethics, class, the decline of the nobility and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a series of works that deal to powerful results with the violation of civil liberties by oppressive regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly declared crazy and locked in a room with an genuine madman who believes himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the whole orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the brutal ridiculousness of communist repression with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a