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Every one of the finest playwrights push the frontiers of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their distinct manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized subjects – ranging from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the enigma of awareness – and transform them into clever, imaginative and frequently moving dramas. Theatre, the actor Olivier remarked, is a great glamoriser of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Initial Discovery

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard early on. That was entirely because of a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to give a short talk on two radio plays by a back then unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer accumulated an ever escalating taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the voice of the time. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was exceptionally courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the ways of the media.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we eventually 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 constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our end. 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 word is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The characteristic combination of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a significant philosophical question: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an absolute, God-given law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the subject of a lecture being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the a library in London where he was gripping a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With time, the emotional content of his plays became ever more apparent. The key moment perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It raises a plethora of issues such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of individual madness and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist beyond our understanding of them. But beneath 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 deals with determinism and volition, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is profoundly emotional. Thoughts and sentiment perfectly merge in a moment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past civilisations to which her teacher answers: “Scientific insights glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newton's world outlasts her sadly abbreviated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was infrequently doubted. What was discussed, especially in the beginning, were his doubts about the effectiveness of drama: something he often talked about in interviews. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a continuous critique on wealth, wedlock, values, social class, the fall of the aristocracy and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a collection of works that deal to significant impact with the abuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic wrongly pronounced mad and locked in a room with an real lunatic who thinks he is in charge of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the entire LSO on stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the cruel illogicalities of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with irony and inflexibility with a