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Every one of the great dramatists push the frontiers of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their unique fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric themes – ranging from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the puzzle of awareness – and turn them into witty, creative and frequently moving dramas. Drama, the actor Olivier remarked, is a powerful glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Early Encounter

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly due to Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a at that time obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer ran up an skyrocketing cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained impeccably gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the nature of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the quiet, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive blend of intellectual audacity and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a major ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules followed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the subject of a lecture being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the a library in London where he was holding a pile of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became more and more visible. The breakthrough arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to reproduction. It asks a plethora of queries such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of individual madness and whether ideas such as justice and national pride exist beyond our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute realization of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is profoundly moving. Concepts and feeling flawlessly come together in a scene where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past civilizations to which her tutor responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the Newton's world outlasts her sadly cut short life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was infrequently questioned. What was contested, notably in the initial period, were his doubts about the efficacy of drama: something he often explored in interviews. “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 hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a ongoing observation on money, wedlock, ethics, social class, the fall of the upper class and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a number of works that deal to significant impact with the misuse of individual freedoms by oppressive systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic incorrectly pronounced insane and locked in a cell with an genuine madman who believes himself in command of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the full LSO on the stage and to see Stoppard exposing the harsh illogicalities of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with wit and inflexibility with a