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Every one of the outstanding playwrights extend the frontiers of theatre. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their distinct manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure topics – from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the enigma of consciousness – and transform them into witty, imaginative and regularly moving dramas. Theatre, the actor Olivier noted, is a powerful glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Initial Discovery

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard early on. That was completely because of Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to present a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a then obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer racked up an ever escalating cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained perfectly polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the ways of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by character and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances causing our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the quiet, resisting 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 present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a significant ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles followed an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the subject of a speech being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the entrance of the London Library where he was clutching a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly evident. The breakthrough arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to reproduction. It poses a plethora of issues such as whether any civic duty is the result of private derangement and whether concepts such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute awareness of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and volition, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is profoundly touching. Ideas and feeling flawlessly merge in a segment where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past civilisations to which her teacher replies: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was seldom doubted. What was contested, notably in the beginning, were his doubts about the efficacy of art: something he regularly discussed in conversations. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social 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 avoids serious topics.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a ongoing observation on finance, matrimony, values, social class, the weakening of the aristocracy and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a number of works that grapple to great effect with the violation of civil liberties by dictatorial systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic incorrectly diagnosed crazy and locked in a cell with an genuine madman who thinks he is in control of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard revealing the harsh ridiculousness of communist repression with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with irony and rigidity with a