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All the finest playwrights extend the frontiers of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their own manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric subjects – from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the enigma of the mind – and transform them into humorous, inventive and regularly touching dramas. Theatre, Laurence Olivier once said, is a powerful glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Initial Encounter

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard early on. That was wholly thanks to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to give a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a back then little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer accumulated an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained exceptionally gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the ways of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The typical blend of intellectual audacity and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a big moral issue: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether principles obeyed an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the subject of a talk being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into 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 replied.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly evident. The breakthrough perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to restaging. It raises a plethora of queries such as whether any civic duty is the result of private derangement and whether notions such as justice and patriotism exist outside our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense awareness of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and volition, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is profoundly emotional. Thoughts and feeling seamlessly merge in a segment where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past civilisations to which her teacher answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was rarely questioned. What was contested, especially in the beginning, were his skepticism about the efficacy of theatre: something he often explored 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 social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a continuous critique on wealth, marriage, morals, class, the weakening of the nobility and the rise of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a series of works that grapple to powerful results with the misuse of human rights by oppressive governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic incorrectly pronounced mad and imprisoned in a chamber with an authentic psychiatric patient who believes himself in command of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the full orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the harsh absurdities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with wit and strictness with a