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All the finest playwrights extend the frontiers of theatre. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their unique fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized themes – from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the enigma of awareness – and turn them into witty, inventive and often touching dramas. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a powerful glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Initial Discovery

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly due to Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to present a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a then obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer accumulated an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was perfectly gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the workings of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances leading to our demise. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive fusion of conceptual boldness and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a significant philosophical question: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the focus of a speech being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a fractured marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the London Library where he was holding a pile of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With time, the feeling of his plays became increasingly apparent. The breakthrough likely came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It raises a plethora of queries such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of personal instability and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is deeply moving. Thoughts and feeling perfectly coincide in a segment where a gifted youth, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past civilizations to which her teacher replies: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the Newton's world survives her unfortunately truncated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was infrequently challenged. What was debated, especially in the beginning, were his reservations about the power of drama: something he often explored in interviews. “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 the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a continuous critique on finance, matrimony, ethics, social class, the decline of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a series of works that grapple to powerful results with the abuse of civil liberties by dictatorial regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist falsely pronounced insane and imprisoned in a chamber with an real lunatic who thinks he is in charge of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the cruel absurdities of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with irony and rigidity with a