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Every one of the outstanding dramatists broaden the boundaries of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their own way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric subjects – ranging from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of consciousness – and turn them into witty, imaginative and frequently touching theatrical works. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a great glamoriser of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Initial Discovery

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard early on. That was entirely thanks to Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to present a mini-speech on two radio plays by a then unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer accumulated 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 struck by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed exceptionally gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the workings of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was invariably 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 praised for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the stillness, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The typical blend of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a major ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether principles adhered to an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the topic of a speech being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the entrance of the London Library where he was holding a pile of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the feeling of his plays became more and more evident. The key moment perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to revival. It raises a whole host of questions such as whether any public commitment is the result of private derangement and whether ideas such as justice and national pride exist independent of our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute realization of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is profoundly touching. Concepts and emotion perfectly coincide in a segment where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past civilizations to which her tutor replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the classical physics outlasts her sadly truncated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was rarely doubted. What was debated, particularly in the beginning, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of drama: something he often discussed in interviews. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or 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 says nothing about anything.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a continuous critique on wealth, wedlock, ethics, class, the fall of the aristocracy and the rise of business. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a collection of works that engage to great effect with the abuse of civil liberties by dictatorial systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic falsely declared insane and imprisoned in a room with an genuine lunatic who believes himself in control of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the full LSO on stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the cruel absurdities of communist repression with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with irony and rigidity with a