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All the outstanding playwrights extend the boundaries of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their unique fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric themes – from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the enigma of consciousness – and convert them into humorous, imaginative and often moving theatrical works. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a powerful glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Initial Encounter

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly thanks to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a at that time obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer ran up an ever escalating taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was exceptionally courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the ways of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the silence, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic blend of daring ideas and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a significant ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the subject of a lecture being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the anguish of a fractured marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the London Library where he was clutching a pile of books that reached up 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 key moment perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It raises a multitude of questions such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of personal instability and whether concepts such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, works because it is intensely touching. Thoughts and feeling flawlessly come together in a scene where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past civilisations to which her instructor responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the Newton's world survives her unfortunately truncated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was infrequently doubted. What was discussed, particularly in the early years, were his reservations about the efficacy of art: 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 Vietnam or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a running commentary on finance, matrimony, morals, social class, the decline of the aristocracy and the rise of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a number of works that deal to significant impact with the misuse of human rights by dictatorial governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident falsely declared insane and confined in a room with an authentic psychiatric patient who thinks he is in charge of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the cruel ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with irony and inflexibility with a