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All the finest playwrights extend the frontiers of theatre. Beckett and Pinter did it in their own fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric subjects – ranging from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of the mind – and turn them into witty, inventive and often moving dramas. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a powerful glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Early Discovery

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly due to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a at that time little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer ran up an constantly rising taxi-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 impressed by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed perfectly polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the ways of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling 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 indicate that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances leading to our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The distinctive fusion of daring ideas and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a significant moral issue: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the topic of a lecture being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the London Library where he was gripping a stack of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With time, the emotional content of his plays became ever more visible. The key moment perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to reproduction. It poses a plethora of issues such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of individual madness and whether concepts such as justice and national pride exist independent of our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened awareness of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and volition, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is intensely moving. Concepts and emotion perfectly coincide in a moment where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past civilizations to which her instructor answers: “Scientific insights seen briefly and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe survives her sadly truncated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was seldom doubted. What was contested, especially in the initial period, were his skepticism about the power of art: something he often 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 hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a ongoing observation on finance, matrimony, values, social class, the fall of the upper class and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a series of works that engage to great effect with the abuse of individual freedoms by oppressive systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist falsely diagnosed insane and confined in a room with an genuine madman who imagines himself in charge of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the harsh illogicalities of communist repression with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a