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All the outstanding dramatists extend the boundaries of drama. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their own fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized topics – from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the enigma of awareness – and transform them into humorous, creative and often moving dramas. Drama, the actor Olivier once said, is a powerful glamorizer of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Early Introduction

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely because of Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a mini-speech on two radio plays by a back then unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer racked up an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed perfectly courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the workings of the media.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances causing our demise. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the silence, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The distinctive blend of daring ideas and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a major philosophical question: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the subject of a speech being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was gripping a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly visible. The turning point perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to reproduction. It asks a plethora of questions such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of personal instability and whether concepts such as fairness and national pride exist beyond our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense consciousness of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and choice, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is profoundly emotional. Thoughts and sentiment flawlessly merge in a scene where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, laments the loss of past civilizations to which her tutor replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the Newton's world outlasts her sadly abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was seldom challenged. What was discussed, especially in the initial period, were his reservations about the effectiveness of drama: something he often talked about in conversations. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social 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 think he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a ongoing observation on finance, matrimony, morals, status, the decline of the upper class and the rise of business. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a collection of works that deal to great effect with the misuse of civil liberties by oppressive governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly diagnosed insane and locked in a chamber with an genuine lunatic who imagines himself in command of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the brutal illogicalities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a