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Every one of the finest playwrights push the frontiers of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their unique manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized topics – from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the puzzle of awareness – and turn them into witty, imaginative and often touching theatrical works. The stage, the actor Olivier once said, is a significant glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Discovery

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard early on. That was completely due to Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to give a short talk on two audio dramas by a at that time unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer racked up an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained impeccably courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the nature of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by character and plot. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances causing our end. 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 word is all. The word is resisting the stillness, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The typical combination of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a major ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an universal, God-given law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the focus of a talk being prepared by the play’s protagonist, 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 risks of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was holding a mound of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became increasingly apparent. The key moment arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to revival. It asks a whole host of issues such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of private derangement and whether ideas such as justice and patriotism exist independent of our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense consciousness of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and volition, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is deeply touching. Ideas and emotion perfectly come together in a segment where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past civilisations to which her tutor replies: “Scientific insights glimpsed and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newton's world survives her sadly cut short life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was rarely questioned. What was debated, especially in the early years, were his doubts about the efficacy of theatre: something he frequently talked about in conversations. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a continuous critique on finance, matrimony, morals, class, the decline of the upper class and the dominance of business. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a series of works that engage to significant impact with the abuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic falsely pronounced crazy and locked in a chamber with an real lunatic who imagines himself in charge of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the full orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the cruel illogicalities of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a