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All the great dramatists extend the frontiers of drama. Beckett and Pinter did it in their own manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric topics – from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of awareness – and convert them into witty, creative and often touching dramas. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a significant glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Early Discovery

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard early on. That was completely thanks to Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he asked me to present a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a at that time little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer accumulated an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed perfectly gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the ways of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the start, 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 eventually came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances causing our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the silence, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The distinctive fusion of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a major philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the topic of a speech being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the London Library where he was clutching a mound of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became more and more visible. The turning point arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to revival. It asks a plethora of questions such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of personal instability and whether concepts such as justice and national pride exist outside our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened awareness of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and volition, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, works because it is profoundly emotional. Ideas and feeling flawlessly merge in a moment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, laments the demise of past cultures to which her teacher responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the classical physics outlasts her sadly cut short life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was rarely questioned. What was discussed, particularly in the beginning, were his reservations about the efficacy of theatre: something he regularly talked about in discussions. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a continuous critique on money, wedlock, values, social class, the fall of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a series of works that grapple to great effect with the violation of civil liberties by authoritarian regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic wrongly diagnosed mad and imprisoned in a cell with an authentic lunatic who believes himself in command of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the full orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard exposing the harsh ridiculousness of communist repression with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with irony and inflexibility with a