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Every one of the great dramatists push the frontiers of theatre. Beckett and Pinter did it in their own way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric themes – ranging from chaos theory to ethical thought and the enigma of consciousness – and turn them into humorous, inventive and frequently touching dramas. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a great glamoriser of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Early Discovery

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard early on. That was completely due to Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to give a brief lecture on two radio plays by a then obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer ran up an constantly rising taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed impeccably polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the workings of our world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we eventually 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 ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances causing our demise. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the silence, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The distinctive fusion of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a big philosophical question: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an universal, God-given law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the subject of a lecture being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the entrance of the London Library where he was clutching a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly apparent. The breakthrough arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to revival. It poses a plethora of queries such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of personal instability and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist beyond our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute awareness of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and choice, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, functions because it is intensely touching. Ideas and emotion perfectly merge in a scene where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past cultures to which her tutor answers: “Scientific insights caught sight of and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newton's world outlasts her sadly truncated life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was rarely challenged. What was contested, particularly in the initial period, were his doubts about the efficacy of art: something he regularly discussed in interviews. “I used to feel isolated,” 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 housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a ongoing observation on wealth, marriage, morals, social class, the decline of the upper class and the rise of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a collection of works that deal to great effect with the violation of civil liberties by dictatorial systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist falsely diagnosed mad and confined in a chamber with an authentic psychiatric patient who imagines himself in charge of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard revealing the brutal illogicalities of communist repression with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a