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Every one of the outstanding dramatists extend the frontiers of drama. Beckett and Pinter did it in their distinct manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric themes – from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the mystery of consciousness – and turn them into clever, imaginative and often emotional dramas. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a significant glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Initial Discovery

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely because of Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a brief lecture on two radio plays by a then obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer racked up an ever escalating cab fare. 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 impressed by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed impeccably gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the nature of our world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the silence, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive blend of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a big ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether principles adhered to an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the subject of a speech being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the entrance of the London Library where he was holding a mound of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly evident. The turning point likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to reproduction. It poses a whole host of queries such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of private derangement and whether concepts such as justice and national pride exist outside our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute awareness of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and free will, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, functions because it is profoundly moving. Concepts and emotion flawlessly come together in a moment where a gifted youth, Thomasina, laments the demise of past cultures to which her teacher responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the Newtonian universe survives her sadly cut short life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was seldom questioned. What was discussed, particularly in the beginning, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of theatre: something he regularly discussed 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 Vietnam or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a ongoing observation on wealth, matrimony, morals, status, the fall of the nobility and the dominance of business. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a series of works that engage to great effect with the abuse of human rights by dictatorial regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly diagnosed crazy and imprisoned in a room with an genuine madman who imagines himself in command of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the entire orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the cruel illogicalities of communist repression with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a