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All the outstanding playwrights push the frontiers of drama. Beckett and Pinter did it in their own fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized topics – from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the puzzle of consciousness – and convert them into witty, creative and regularly emotional dramas. The stage, Laurence Olivier once said, is a great glamoriser of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Initial Discovery

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly thanks to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to give a short talk on two radio plays by a then unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer accumulated an constantly rising cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was impeccably courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the nature of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances causing our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the quiet, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The typical fusion of intellectual audacity and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a significant ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles followed an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the focus of a talk being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the entrance of the London Library where he was clutching a mound of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly visible. The breakthrough perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to reproduction. It raises a plethora of issues such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of private derangement and whether notions such as justice and patriotism exist outside our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense realization of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and volition, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, works because it is intensely moving. Ideas and emotion seamlessly come together in a moment where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past cultures to which her teacher replies: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the classical physics endures beyond her tragically abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was seldom questioned. What was discussed, especially in the initial period, were his doubts about the effectiveness of theatre: something he regularly talked about in interviews. “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 the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a ongoing observation on wealth, marriage, morals, status, the fall of the nobility and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a series of works that deal to great effect with the abuse of human rights by dictatorial governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic wrongly diagnosed insane and confined in a room with an authentic madman who believes himself in control of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the whole LSO on the stage and to see Stoppard exposing the harsh absurdities of communist repression with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and strictness with a