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All the outstanding playwrights push the frontiers of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their own fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure subjects – ranging from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the puzzle of awareness – and transform them into witty, creative and often emotional plays. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a powerful glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Initial Discovery

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely due to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to give a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a back then obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer racked up an ever escalating taxi bill. 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 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 gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed perfectly polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the ways of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we in time 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 cleverness in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances leading to our demise. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The typical blend of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a significant moral issue: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules followed an universal, God-given law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the subject of a talk being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a fractured marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the entrance of the London Library where he was holding a stack of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became ever more visible. The breakthrough likely came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to revival. It raises a multitude of issues such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of private derangement and whether notions such as justice and national pride exist beyond our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute consciousness of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is deeply touching. Ideas and feeling seamlessly merge in a moment where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past cultures to which her instructor replies: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the Newton's world outlasts her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was infrequently challenged. What was discussed, particularly in the early years, were his reservations about the efficacy of drama: something he frequently explored in interviews. “I used to feel isolated,” 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 hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a running commentary on money, marriage, ethics, status, the decline of the nobility and the rise of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a series of works that grapple to significant impact with the violation of human rights by dictatorial governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly pronounced crazy and locked in a chamber with an authentic madman who thinks he is in control of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the full orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the cruel ridiculousness of communist repression with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with wit and rigidity with a