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All the outstanding dramatists extend the boundaries of theatre. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their unique fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure subjects – ranging from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the enigma of the mind – and transform them into humorous, imaginative and frequently emotional dramas. The stage, the actor Olivier once said, is a great glamoriser of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Early Discovery

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely due to Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to present a short talk on two broadcast plays by a then little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer racked up an ever escalating taxi-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 cleverness of both plays and got to meet 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 critical first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was exceptionally courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the nature of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the silence, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The typical fusion of daring ideas and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a significant ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether principles adhered to an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the focus of a lecture being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Revelation

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

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly evident. The key moment perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to restaging. It poses a whole host of questions such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of individual madness and whether concepts such as fairness and national pride exist beyond our understanding of them. But behind 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 explores determinism and free will, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly touching. Thoughts and emotion seamlessly coincide in a segment where a gifted youth, Thomasina, laments the loss of past civilisations to which her tutor replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her sadly cut short life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was seldom challenged. What was discussed, especially in the beginning, were his doubts about the effectiveness of drama: something he often discussed in interviews. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a continuous critique on money, marriage, morals, social class, the decline of the nobility and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a series of works that engage to powerful results with the abuse of civil liberties by dictatorial systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly diagnosed mad and confined in a cell with an authentic madman who thinks he is in control of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the whole orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the harsh ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a