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All the great playwrights broaden the frontiers of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their own manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric topics – ranging from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the mystery of awareness – and convert them into witty, creative and frequently moving theatrical works. Theatre, the actor Olivier remarked, is a significant glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Initial Discovery

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly because of Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to give a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a at that time obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer racked up an ever escalating taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained exceptionally courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the nature of our world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the silence, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic fusion of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a major philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the topic of a lecture being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the London Library where he was holding a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became more and more apparent. The breakthrough perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It asks a plethora of questions such as whether any civic duty is the result of personal instability and whether ideas such as justice and patriotism exist independent of our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense awareness of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and volition, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, works because it is deeply emotional. Concepts and feeling perfectly coincide in a moment where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past cultures to which her instructor answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newton's world endures beyond her sadly truncated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was seldom questioned. What was contested, especially in the early years, were his doubts about the power of art: something he frequently 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 Vietnam or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a continuous critique on finance, wedlock, ethics, class, the decline of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a collection of works that deal to powerful results with the violation of human rights by dictatorial regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic falsely diagnosed mad and locked in a chamber with an genuine lunatic who thinks he is in control of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the harsh absurdities of communist repression with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with irony and inflexibility with a