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All the outstanding playwrights extend the frontiers of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their distinct way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized topics – from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the mystery of consciousness – and transform them into witty, inventive and frequently moving plays. Theatre, Laurence Olivier once said, is a powerful glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Initial Discovery

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly due to Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a short talk on two audio dramas by a at that time unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer racked up 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 time announcement service. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed impeccably gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the ways of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The distinctive blend of daring ideas and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a major ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules followed an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the subject of a speech being developed by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the London Library where he was clutching a mound of books that came up 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 ever more visible. The key moment likely came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to reproduction. It raises a multitude of questions such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of personal instability and whether concepts such as justice and national pride exist outside our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and choice, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is deeply emotional. Ideas and emotion perfectly merge in a moment where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past cultures to which her teacher replies: “Scientific insights seen briefly and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the classical physics outlasts her sadly truncated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was seldom challenged. What was contested, especially in the initial period, were his doubts about the efficacy of drama: something he regularly explored in conversations. “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 avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a ongoing observation on wealth, marriage, morals, status, the decline of the nobility and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a number of works that grapple to great effect with the misuse of civil liberties by dictatorial systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic falsely pronounced mad and locked in a room with an genuine madman who imagines himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the cruel ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and strictness with a