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All the outstanding playwrights extend the frontiers of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their own way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized themes – ranging from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the enigma of awareness – and transform them into witty, imaginative and regularly touching plays. The stage, Laurence Olivier noted, is a powerful embellisher of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Initial Encounter

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard early on. That was entirely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to give a short talk on two radio plays by a back then little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer racked up an ever escalating taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was exceptionally polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the workings of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by character and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances causing our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the silence, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive combination of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a significant philosophical question: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions followed an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the topic of a speech being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the London Library where he was holding a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With time, the feeling of his plays became more and more apparent. The turning point arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to revival. It raises a plethora of issues such as whether any public commitment is the result of personal instability and whether ideas such as justice and patriotism exist outside our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute realization of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and volition, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, works because it is profoundly moving. Ideas and emotion perfectly merge in a segment where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, laments the demise of past civilisations to which her teacher responds: “Scientific insights seen briefly and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the classical physics outlasts her sadly abbreviated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was rarely questioned. What was debated, especially in the early years, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of drama: something he regularly explored in conversations. “I used to feel alone,” 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 hesitation 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 provides a continuous critique on finance, marriage, values, status, the weakening of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a collection of works that grapple to great effect with the misuse of human rights by authoritarian regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly pronounced crazy and imprisoned in a room with an genuine lunatic who thinks he is in command of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard revealing the cruel illogicalities of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and strictness with a