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Every one of the outstanding dramatists extend the frontiers of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their distinct manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure topics – from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the enigma of the mind – and transform them into humorous, imaginative and frequently touching dramas. Theatre, Laurence Olivier noted, is a powerful glamorizer of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Early Introduction

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard early on. That was wholly because of Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to give a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a then unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer accumulated an constantly rising cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was impeccably polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the nature of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances causing our demise. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the quiet, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive fusion of daring ideas and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a big moral issue: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles followed an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the focus of a speech being developed by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was gripping a mound of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly apparent. The breakthrough arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to restaging. It poses a plethora of queries such as whether any civic duty is the result of private derangement and whether concepts such as justice and national pride exist independent of our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and choice, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is intensely touching. Ideas and sentiment seamlessly merge in a scene where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, laments the demise of past civilisations to which her teacher replies: “Scientific insights caught sight of and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the classical physics outlasts her unfortunately cut short life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was rarely questioned. What was discussed, especially in the beginning, were his reservations about the effectiveness of drama: something he regularly discussed in interviews. “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 Vietnam or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a ongoing observation on money, marriage, morals, social class, the weakening of the upper class and the dominance of business. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a number of works that engage 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 Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic wrongly pronounced insane and imprisoned in a cell with an genuine lunatic who believes himself in command of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the whole orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the brutal illogicalities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with irony and inflexibility with a