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All the finest dramatists push the frontiers of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their unique way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric topics – from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the puzzle of consciousness – and turn them into humorous, inventive and regularly moving dramas. Theatre, Laurence Olivier once said, is a significant glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Early Introduction

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a at that time unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer ran up an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained impeccably gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the nature of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we eventually 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 cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances resulting in our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the silence, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The typical blend of daring ideas and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a significant ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the focus 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 pain of a broken marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the London Library where he was gripping a pile of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly evident. The turning point perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to revival. It poses a whole host of questions such as whether any social obligation is the result of personal instability and whether concepts such as justice and national pride exist outside our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened realization of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and choice, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, works because it is profoundly touching. Concepts and sentiment seamlessly merge in a scene where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, laments the demise of past civilizations to which her tutor responds: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the Newton's world survives her sadly truncated life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was seldom doubted. What was debated, notably in the beginning, were his reservations about the power of drama: something he frequently talked about in interviews. “I used to feel out on a limb,” 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 compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a continuous critique on money, matrimony, values, social class, the weakening of the upper class and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a collection of works that grapple to great effect with the violation of human rights by dictatorial systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident incorrectly pronounced mad and confined in a room with an genuine psychiatric patient who believes himself in charge of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the entire orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the brutal ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and strictness with a