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Every one of the outstanding dramatists broaden the frontiers of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their unique way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric subjects – ranging from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the enigma of awareness – and transform them into witty, inventive and often emotional dramas. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a powerful glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Early Introduction

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard early on. That was wholly because of a man named Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to present a brief lecture on two radio plays by a then unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer accumulated an ever escalating taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed perfectly courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the nature of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances causing our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The typical blend of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a significant moral issue: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the focus of a lecture being written 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 risks of a collapsing society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was clutching a stack of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With time, the feeling of his plays became increasingly apparent. The breakthrough likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to revival. It asks a whole host of issues such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of individual madness and whether ideas such as fairness and national pride exist outside our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute awareness of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and volition, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is intensely touching. Concepts and sentiment perfectly merge in a scene where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past civilisations to which her teacher responds: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the classical physics endures beyond her sadly cut short life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was rarely challenged. What was contested, especially in the early years, were his reservations about the efficacy of drama: something he frequently explored in conversations. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a ongoing observation on wealth, marriage, morals, class, the weakening of the nobility and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a series of works that grapple to great effect with the violation of individual freedoms by dictatorial regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident wrongly diagnosed mad and imprisoned in a room with an genuine psychiatric patient who thinks he is in command of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the whole LSO on stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the harsh ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a