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Every one of the outstanding dramatists broaden the frontiers of theatre. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their own manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric topics – from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the enigma of awareness – and transform them into clever, inventive and often moving plays. Theatre, the actor Olivier noted, is a great glamoriser of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Early Discovery

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard early on. That was entirely because of Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to give a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a then obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer racked up an ever escalating taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed exceptionally gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the nature of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances causing our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the silence, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive combination of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a significant moral issue: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an universal, God-given law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the focus of a speech being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a fractured marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

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

With time, the feeling of his plays became increasingly apparent. The turning point arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It poses a whole host of issues such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of personal instability and whether notions such as justice and national pride exist beyond our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is intensely moving. Thoughts and feeling perfectly coincide in a segment where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past cultures to which her tutor answers: “Scientific insights seen briefly and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the classical physics survives her sadly truncated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was seldom questioned. What was contested, notably in the early years, were his reservations about the power of theatre: something he frequently 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 the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a ongoing observation on money, matrimony, ethics, social class, the fall of the nobility and the dominance of business. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a number of works that engage to great effect with the violation of human rights by oppressive governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident falsely diagnosed crazy and locked in a room with an authentic psychiatric patient who thinks he is in control of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the full orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the brutal ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with irony and inflexibility with a