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Every one of the outstanding playwrights push the frontiers of drama. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their distinct manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized subjects – ranging from chaos theory to ethical thought and the puzzle of consciousness – and convert them into witty, creative and regularly moving plays. Drama, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a great glamorizer of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Early Encounter

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard early on. That was completely due to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to present a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a back then little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer accumulated an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was impeccably courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the ways of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances leading to our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the quiet, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The typical combination of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a major philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an absolute, God-given law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the topic of a lecture being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the a library in London where he was holding a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became more and more evident. The breakthrough perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It raises a whole host of questions such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of private derangement and whether concepts such as fairness and patriotism exist beyond our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened consciousness of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and choice, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, works because it is deeply moving. Ideas and sentiment seamlessly merge in a moment where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past cultures to which her teacher answers: “Scientific insights seen briefly and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the Newton's world survives her unfortunately cut short life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was infrequently doubted. What was discussed, especially in the beginning, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of drama: something he frequently talked about 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 the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a running commentary on wealth, wedlock, ethics, social class, the weakening of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a series of works that engage to powerful results with the violation of civil liberties by oppressive governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist falsely declared insane and confined in a room with an genuine psychiatric patient who imagines himself in control of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the full LSO on the stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the cruel illogicalities of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a