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All the finest playwrights extend the frontiers of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their distinct fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized themes – from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the puzzle of the mind – and convert them into humorous, imaginative and regularly touching dramas. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a significant glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Early Encounter

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard early on. That was wholly because of Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to give a mini-speech on two radio plays by a then obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer ran up an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was exceptionally gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the nature of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances leading to our demise. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the silence, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive blend of daring ideas and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a major ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether principles obeyed an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the focus 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 anguish of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the London Library where he was gripping a mound of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became ever more visible. The key moment likely came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to restaging. It poses a multitude of questions such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of individual madness 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 heightened consciousness of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and free will, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, works because it is profoundly emotional. Ideas and feeling seamlessly merge in a moment where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, laments the loss of past civilizations to which her tutor replies: “Scientific insights glimpsed and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe survives her sadly abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was infrequently doubted. What was discussed, notably in the initial period, were his reservations about the effectiveness of art: something he frequently explored in conversations. “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 Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a continuous critique on finance, marriage, values, class, the fall of the aristocracy and the rise of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a collection of works that engage to significant impact with the abuse of human rights by dictatorial systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident wrongly declared mad and imprisoned in a room with an authentic madman who thinks he is in control of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the harsh illogicalities of communist repression with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with irony and inflexibility with a