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All the finest playwrights extend the frontiers of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their own fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized themes – from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the puzzle of the mind – and convert them into humorous, inventive and regularly emotional dramas. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a powerful embellisher of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Early Encounter

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly due to Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to present a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a back then little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer racked up an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance 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 first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was impeccably courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the ways of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances leading to our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the stillness, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The distinctive combination of daring ideas and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a significant philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles obeyed an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the focus 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 fractured marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the London Library where he was gripping a stack of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With time, the emotional content of his plays became ever more evident. The turning point likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to revival. It poses a multitude of queries such as whether any public commitment is the result of personal instability and whether concepts such as justice and patriotism exist independent of our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened realization of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and volition, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, works because it is intensely touching. Ideas and sentiment seamlessly coincide in a segment where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past civilizations to which her tutor replies: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the classical physics survives her tragically abbreviated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was infrequently challenged. What was discussed, particularly in the initial period, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of art: something he regularly discussed 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 housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a ongoing observation on wealth, wedlock, values, social class, the fall of the aristocracy and the dominance of business. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a series of works that engage to significant impact with the violation of human rights by dictatorial regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident falsely declared insane and confined in a cell with an real psychiatric patient who believes himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the full LSO on stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the brutal absurdities of communist repression with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “force is met with wit and strictness with a