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All the great dramatists broaden the boundaries of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their own way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized subjects – ranging from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the mystery of awareness – and convert them into clever, imaginative and regularly emotional dramas. Drama, the actor Olivier once said, is a powerful glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Initial Discovery

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely thanks to Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to give a short talk on two audio dramas by a then little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer accumulated an skyrocketing cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was perfectly polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the ways of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances leading to our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The characteristic blend of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a big moral issue: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an absolute, God-given law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the topic of a speech being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the entrance of the London Library where he was clutching a pile of books that came 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 apparent. The breakthrough arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to revival. It asks a whole host of questions such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of individual madness and whether ideas such as fairness and national pride exist outside our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute realization of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and free will, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, functions because it is intensely moving. Ideas and emotion flawlessly come together in a moment where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past civilizations to which her tutor responds: “Scientific insights caught sight of and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the Newtonian universe outlasts her sadly cut short life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was seldom questioned. What was discussed, especially in the initial period, were his skepticism about the efficacy of theatre: something he often discussed in discussions. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a running commentary on wealth, matrimony, values, social class, the fall of the upper class and the dominance of business. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a number of works that grapple to great effect with the abuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident incorrectly diagnosed mad and confined in a chamber with an real lunatic who imagines himself in control of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the entire orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the brutal illogicalities of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with wit and rigidity with a