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All the outstanding dramatists broaden the frontiers of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their distinct fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric themes – from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the mystery of consciousness – and convert them into witty, inventive and frequently touching plays. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a great embellisher of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Initial Discovery

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly because of Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a brief lecture on two radio plays by a back then obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer ran up an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical 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 former journalist himself, he knew the ways of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances causing our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the silence, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The typical blend of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a big moral issue: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions followed an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the subject of a speech being developed by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was holding a pile of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the years, the feeling of his plays became ever more visible. The key moment perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to restaging. It asks a plethora of issues such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of personal instability and whether concepts such as justice and patriotism exist outside our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute consciousness of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and volition, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is deeply emotional. Thoughts and sentiment flawlessly come together in a scene where a gifted youth, Thomasina, laments the demise of past civilisations to which her instructor responds: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the classical physics outlasts her sadly abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was rarely questioned. What was contested, notably in the initial period, were his skepticism about the efficacy of art: something he often discussed in conversations. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a ongoing observation on money, matrimony, ethics, class, the fall of the aristocracy and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a collection of works that deal to powerful results with the misuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly declared insane and imprisoned in a room with an real madman who believes himself in charge of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the entire LSO on the stage and to see Stoppard revealing the brutal absurdities of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and strictness with a