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All the great playwrights broaden the frontiers of drama. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their unique way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized themes – ranging from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the mystery of the mind – and convert them into witty, inventive and frequently emotional plays. Drama, the actor Olivier remarked, is a great glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Discovery

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely due to Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he asked me to give a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a then obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer accumulated an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was exceptionally polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the workings of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was always 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 cleverness in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances causing our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the stillness, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic blend of intellectual audacity and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a big moral issue: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions followed an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the focus of a speech being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a broken 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 Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was clutching a stack of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly evident. The key moment arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to reproduction. It asks a whole host of questions such as whether any public commitment is the result of private derangement and whether notions such as justice and patriotism exist outside our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened awareness of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and volition, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is deeply moving. Ideas and feeling seamlessly coincide in a segment where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past civilizations to which her tutor responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the Newton's world survives her tragically cut short life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was infrequently doubted. What was discussed, notably in the initial period, were his reservations about the efficacy of drama: something he often discussed in interviews. “I used to feel isolated,” 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 allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a continuous critique on wealth, matrimony, ethics, class, the fall of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a collection of works that deal to powerful results with the misuse of civil liberties by authoritarian regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident falsely pronounced crazy and confined in a room with an authentic psychiatric patient who thinks he is in control of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the brutal ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a