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Every one of the finest dramatists push the frontiers of theatre. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their distinct manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric themes – from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the mystery of awareness – and convert them into witty, inventive and regularly touching plays. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a powerful glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Discovery

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard early on. That was wholly due to Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a then unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer ran up an constantly rising 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 time announcement service. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained impeccably polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the nature of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the silence, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The typical combination of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a significant moral issue: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles followed an universal, God-given law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the topic of a lecture being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was gripping a mound of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became ever more visible. The breakthrough arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to revival. It poses a multitude of issues such as whether any public commitment is the result of private derangement and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute consciousness of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly moving. Concepts and emotion flawlessly coincide in a scene where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past civilisations to which her instructor responds: “Scientific insights glimpsed and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her tragically abbreviated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was rarely doubted. What was contested, particularly in the beginning, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of theatre: something he often discussed in interviews. “I used to feel alone,” 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 qualms about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a continuous critique on money, matrimony, ethics, social class, the fall of the nobility and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a collection of works that deal to great effect with the abuse of civil liberties by dictatorial systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist falsely declared insane and imprisoned in a cell with an genuine psychiatric patient who thinks he is in command of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the whole orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the cruel ridiculousness of communist repression with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a