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Every one of the outstanding playwrights broaden the frontiers of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their unique manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized themes – from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the enigma of awareness – and turn them into witty, inventive and often emotional plays. Drama, the actor Olivier once said, is a significant glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Early Discovery

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely due to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to present a mini-speech on two radio plays by a at that time little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer accumulated an skyrocketing cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was perfectly courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the workings of the media.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, 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 realise 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 commended for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive blend of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a significant moral issue: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an absolute, God-given law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the subject of a lecture 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 suffering of a broken marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the a library in London where he was clutching a pile of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly visible. The key moment likely came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to reproduction. It raises a whole host of queries such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of personal instability and whether concepts such as justice and national pride exist outside our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute consciousness of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and free will, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, works because it is profoundly touching. Ideas and sentiment seamlessly coincide in a moment where a gifted youth, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past civilisations to which her instructor responds: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was rarely challenged. What was debated, especially in the beginning, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of art: something he regularly explored in discussions. “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 housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a running commentary on money, wedlock, morals, status, the fall of the nobility and the dominance of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a number of works that deal to significant impact with the misuse of individual freedoms by authoritarian systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly declared insane and confined in a room with an genuine lunatic who imagines himself in charge of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the harsh ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “force is met with wit and strictness with a