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Every one of the outstanding playwrights extend the frontiers of drama. Beckett and Pinter did it in their own manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure topics – from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the mystery of consciousness – and transform them into humorous, inventive and frequently moving dramas. The stage, Laurence Olivier noted, is a powerful embellisher of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Early Discovery

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard early on. That was wholly due to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to present a mini-speech on two radio plays by a then little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer racked up an ever escalating taxi bill. 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 cleverness of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed exceptionally polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the ways of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the stillness, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The distinctive combination of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a significant ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions followed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the focus of a speech being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the London Library where he was gripping a mound of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became ever more visible. The key moment perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It raises a whole host of questions such as whether any social obligation is the result of personal instability and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense awareness of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and volition, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is deeply emotional. Ideas and emotion flawlessly merge in a segment where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, laments the demise of past civilisations to which her tutor replies: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe survives her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was seldom questioned. What was discussed, particularly in the initial period, were his skepticism about the efficacy of drama: something he frequently discussed in interviews. “I used to feel out on a limb,” 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 allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a continuous critique on wealth, matrimony, ethics, social class, the fall of the nobility and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a number of works that engage to powerful results with the misuse of human rights by authoritarian systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly pronounced insane and imprisoned in a room with an genuine lunatic who believes himself in charge of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the whole LSO on the stage and to see Stoppard revealing the harsh absurdities of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with irony and inflexibility with a