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All the great dramatists broaden the frontiers of drama. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their distinct way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure themes – ranging from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the enigma of consciousness – and transform them into clever, inventive and often moving theatrical works. Theatre, Laurence Olivier noted, is a great glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Early Encounter

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly due to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a mini-speech on two radio plays by a then little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer ran up an constantly rising cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was exceptionally gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the ways of our world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances causing our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the silence, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The distinctive fusion of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a big ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles followed an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the focus of a lecture being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the London Library where he was holding a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became ever more visible. The key moment likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to reproduction. It raises a whole host of questions such as whether any civic duty is the result of private derangement and whether ideas such as justice and national pride exist independent of our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and choice, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, works because it is intensely touching. Ideas and emotion perfectly coincide in a moment where a gifted youth, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past civilisations to which her instructor answers: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe survives her tragically abbreviated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was seldom doubted. What was discussed, especially in the beginning, were his doubts about the efficacy of theatre: something he frequently explored in conversations. “I used to feel isolated,” 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 hesitation about that. To refer obliquely 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 Wilde’s play offers a ongoing observation on money, matrimony, morals, class, the decline of the nobility and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a series of works that engage to significant impact with the abuse of individual freedoms by authoritarian regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic incorrectly declared insane and confined in a cell with an authentic madman who thinks he is in charge of an symphony. It was startling both to see the full LSO on stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the harsh ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with irony and rigidity with a