Tom Stoppard 1937 - 2025

The brilliant dramatist proved that scientific, moral and philosophical ideas could be a source of drama, as long as there was a core of genuine emotion

- Michael Billington

A Il the best dramatists extend the frontiers of drama. The achievement of Tom Stoppard, who has died aged 88, was to take seemingly esoteric subjects - from chaos theory to moral philosophy and turn them into inventive and often moving dramas. Theatre, Laurence Olivier once said, is a great glamoriser of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by character and plot. But we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard's cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances leading to our extinction.