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All the outstanding dramatists push the frontiers of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their distinct manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure themes – ranging from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the mystery of awareness – and turn them into humorous, inventive and frequently touching plays. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a significant glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Early Discovery

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely due to Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to give a mini-speech on two radio plays by a then obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer ran up an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was exceptionally gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the ways of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances leading to our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the silence, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The typical blend of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a significant moral issue: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the focus of a talk being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were receptive to plays about sophisticated 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 holding a pile of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With time, the feeling of his plays became increasingly apparent. The turning point arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to restaging. It asks a multitude of questions such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of personal instability and whether notions such as justice and national pride exist beyond our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened awareness of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and free will, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, works because it is profoundly touching. Thoughts and emotion flawlessly merge in a moment where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past civilisations to which her instructor replies: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the classical physics survives her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was infrequently questioned. What was contested, particularly in the early years, were his doubts about the power of theatre: something he regularly discussed 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 Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a ongoing observation on finance, matrimony, morals, class, the weakening of the aristocracy and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a number of works that grapple to great effect with the violation of individual freedoms by oppressive governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic incorrectly pronounced crazy and imprisoned in a chamber with an authentic psychiatric patient who imagines himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the entire LSO on stage and to see Stoppard revealing the cruel illogicalities of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with irony and rigidity with a