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All the outstanding playwrights broaden the frontiers of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their own way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure subjects – ranging from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the enigma of awareness – and transform them into clever, creative and regularly emotional dramas. The stage, the actor Olivier remarked, is a great glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Early Discovery

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly due to Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a at that time obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer accumulated an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained exceptionally polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the nature of our world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by character and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the stillness, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive fusion of daring ideas and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a major philosophical question: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the topic of a talk being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Revelation

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

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became ever more evident. The turning point perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It asks a multitude of queries such as whether any civic duty is the result of private derangement and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute awareness of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, works because it is intensely moving. Ideas and emotion seamlessly come together in a segment where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, laments the demise of past cultures to which her teacher responds: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the classical physics endures beyond her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was infrequently challenged. What was discussed, particularly in the beginning, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of drama: something he often talked about in interviews. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a ongoing observation on money, matrimony, values, class, the decline of the aristocracy and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a collection of works that deal to significant impact with the violation of civil liberties by authoritarian regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly declared insane and locked in a chamber with an genuine lunatic who believes himself in charge of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the brutal illogicalities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and strictness with a