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All the great dramatists extend the frontiers of drama. Beckett and Pinter did it in their distinct way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure themes – ranging from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the enigma of the mind – and transform them into humorous, imaginative and often touching plays. The stage, Laurence Olivier once said, is a significant glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Early Discovery

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard early on. That was wholly due to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a short talk on two broadcast plays by a back then obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer accumulated an ever escalating taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was perfectly polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the nature of the media.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances causing our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “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 emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive fusion of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a significant ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether principles adhered to an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the topic of a lecture 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 anguish of a broken marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the a library in London where he was gripping a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became more and more evident. The key moment perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It raises a whole host of issues such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of personal instability and whether notions such as justice and national pride exist beyond our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute realization of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and choice, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, works because it is deeply moving. Thoughts and emotion seamlessly come together in a scene where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past cultures to which her tutor responds: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the classical physics survives her sadly truncated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was seldom doubted. What was debated, especially in the early years, were his skepticism about the efficacy of art: something he regularly explored in conversations. “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 compunction about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a running commentary on money, wedlock, values, status, the weakening of the upper class and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a collection of works that engage to powerful results with the misuse of human rights by oppressive systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident incorrectly pronounced insane and imprisoned in a cell with an authentic lunatic who thinks he is in charge of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the brutal ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with wit and inflexibility with a