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Every one of the outstanding playwrights broaden the frontiers of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their own manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric topics – from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the mystery of the mind – and turn them into clever, creative and frequently emotional plays. Theatre, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a significant glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Initial Discovery

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely thanks to Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to give a brief lecture on two radio plays by a back then unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer ran up an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was perfectly polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the ways of our world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances causing our end. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the quiet, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The characteristic combination of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a big ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the topic of a talk being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the a library in London where he was holding a mound of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became more and more apparent. The key moment likely came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to restaging. It asks a plethora of questions such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of private derangement and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and choice, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly moving. Ideas and emotion perfectly coincide in a scene where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past civilisations to which her tutor responds: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the classical physics endures beyond her sadly abbreviated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was infrequently questioned. What was discussed, particularly in the beginning, were his skepticism about the efficacy of theatre: something he regularly talked about in interviews. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a continuous critique on finance, wedlock, values, social class, the decline of the upper class and the dominance of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a series of works that engage to powerful results with the violation of human rights by dictatorial governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist falsely diagnosed mad and imprisoned in a chamber with an genuine madman who imagines himself in control of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the full LSO on the stage and to see Stoppard revealing the brutal absurdities of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with irony and strictness with a