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All the finest dramatists extend the frontiers of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their distinct way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized topics – from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the enigma of awareness – and transform them into witty, creative and often emotional plays. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a great glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Early Discovery

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to give a short talk on two broadcast plays by a back then little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer ran up an ever escalating taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained exceptionally polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the ways of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances causing our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the silence, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive fusion of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a big ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an absolute, God-given law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the subject of a talk being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance 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 responded.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became ever more evident. The turning point likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to revival. It raises a plethora of queries such as whether any public commitment is the result of personal instability and whether concepts such as justice and national pride exist beyond our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened 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 multitude of other things, succeeds because it is deeply moving. Ideas and sentiment perfectly come together in a scene where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past civilisations to which her instructor replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newtonian universe outlasts her unfortunately truncated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was seldom challenged. What was contested, notably in the beginning, were his skepticism about the efficacy of theatre: something he frequently explored in discussions. “I used to feel isolated,” 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 social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a continuous critique on wealth, matrimony, values, status, the fall of the upper class and the dominance of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a series of works that grapple to significant impact with the misuse of individual freedoms by authoritarian governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly declared crazy and locked in a cell with an authentic psychiatric patient who thinks he is in charge of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the full LSO on stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the cruel absurdities of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “force is met with wit and rigidity with a