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Every one of the outstanding playwrights broaden the frontiers of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their own way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized topics – from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the mystery of awareness – and convert them into humorous, inventive and frequently emotional dramas. The stage, the actor Olivier noted, is a powerful embellisher of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Early Introduction

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly thanks to Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to present a mini-speech on two radio plays by a at that time obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer racked up an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness 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 stayed exceptionally gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the ways of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its cleverness in crafting 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 demise. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the silence, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive combination of intellectual audacity and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a major philosophical question: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether principles adhered to an absolute, God-given law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the focus of a talk being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the entrance 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 answered.

With time, the emotional content of his plays became more and more evident. The key moment arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to revival. It asks a plethora of issues such as whether any public commitment is the result of private derangement and whether ideas such as justice and national pride exist outside our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute awareness of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and free will, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly moving. Concepts and emotion seamlessly merge in a segment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past civilisations to which her teacher answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the classical physics endures beyond her sadly abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was seldom questioned. What was debated, especially in the early years, were his reservations about the efficacy of art: something he often explored in discussions. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a ongoing observation on wealth, matrimony, ethics, social class, the fall of the nobility and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a number of works that deal to great effect with the misuse of human rights by dictatorial systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident falsely pronounced insane and locked in a cell with an genuine lunatic who imagines himself in command of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the cruel absurdities of communist repression with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a