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All the great dramatists broaden the boundaries of drama. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their unique manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric topics – ranging from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the mystery of the mind – and convert them into clever, creative and often moving theatrical works. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a great glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Initial Discovery

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly thanks to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to give a mini-speech on two radio plays by a at that time obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer accumulated an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained exceptionally gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the nature of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the quiet, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The typical blend of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a major moral issue: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an absolute, God-given law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the subject of a lecture being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs 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 answered.

With time, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly evident. The breakthrough arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It poses a plethora of questions such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of individual madness and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense realization of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and volition, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, works because it is profoundly moving. Thoughts and feeling perfectly merge in a scene where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past civilizations to which her tutor responds: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the classical physics survives her tragically truncated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was seldom doubted. What was debated, especially in the early years, were his doubts about the efficacy of theatre: something he regularly explored in interviews. “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 housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a continuous critique on wealth, wedlock, values, status, the weakening of the upper class and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a series of works that deal to great effect with the abuse of civil liberties by authoritarian systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident incorrectly declared insane and imprisoned in a cell with an genuine madman who imagines himself in command of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard revealing the brutal illogicalities of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and strictness with a