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All the outstanding dramatists broaden the frontiers of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their unique fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure subjects – ranging from chaos theory to ethical thought and the enigma of the mind – and convert them into humorous, creative and often moving plays. Drama, the actor Olivier remarked, is a significant glamoriser of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Encounter

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely because of Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to present a mini-speech on two radio plays by a then unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer accumulated an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained exceptionally gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the workings of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise 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 cleverness in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances causing our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the quiet, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The distinctive blend of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a big philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether principles obeyed an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the topic of a talk being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the a library in London where he was clutching a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became more and more evident. The key moment likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It raises a whole host of queries such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of individual madness and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and volition, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is intensely emotional. Ideas and sentiment flawlessly merge in a scene where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, laments the demise of past civilisations to which her instructor responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newtonian universe survives her sadly abbreviated life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was rarely doubted. What was discussed, notably in the initial period, were his reservations about the efficacy of drama: something he often talked about in interviews. “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 the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a running commentary on wealth, matrimony, ethics, class, the decline of the upper class and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a collection of works that engage to great effect with the violation of individual freedoms by authoritarian systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic wrongly diagnosed crazy and confined in a chamber with an real lunatic who imagines himself in charge of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the entire LSO on stage and to see Stoppard revealing the cruel absurdities of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “force is met with wit and strictness with a