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All the great dramatists extend the frontiers of drama. Beckett and Pinter did it in their distinct fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric subjects – ranging from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the puzzle of awareness – and convert them into witty, imaginative and often emotional dramas. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a great embellisher of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Early Encounter

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard early on. That was entirely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC producer. 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 racked up an ever escalating cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was impeccably gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the ways of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances causing our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the silence, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The typical blend of conceptual boldness and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a major ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles followed an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the subject of a talk being written by the play’s main character, 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 collapsing society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the stairs 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 the years, the emotional content of his plays became more and more visible. The turning point arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to reproduction. It poses a plethora of issues such as whether any civic duty is the result of individual madness and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense awareness of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and volition, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, works because it is profoundly moving. Ideas and emotion flawlessly merge in a scene where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past cultures to which her teacher answers: “Scientific insights seen briefly and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the classical physics endures beyond her unfortunately cut short life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was rarely challenged. What was contested, particularly in the initial period, were his reservations about the efficacy of drama: something he frequently discussed in discussions. “I used to feel out on a limb,” 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 qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a ongoing observation on wealth, matrimony, values, status, the decline of the aristocracy and the rise of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a collection of works that engage to great effect with the abuse of human rights by oppressive regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly declared mad and confined in a cell with an real psychiatric patient who thinks he is in control of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the harsh ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with irony and rigidity with a