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Every one of the outstanding playwrights extend the frontiers of drama. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their distinct manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric subjects – from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the puzzle of awareness – and turn them into humorous, creative and often moving theatrical works. Drama, the actor Olivier noted, is a great glamoriser of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Encounter

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard early on. That was completely because of Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to present a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a then little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer ran up an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet 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 premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed perfectly courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the workings of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances leading to our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the stillness, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive fusion of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a significant moral issue: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether principles followed an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the focus of a lecture being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the London Library where he was clutching a mound 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 increasingly evident. The turning point perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to restaging. It poses a plethora of queries such as whether any social obligation is the result of individual madness and whether notions such as justice and national pride exist beyond our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, works because it is profoundly moving. Ideas and emotion perfectly merge in a moment where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past civilizations to which her teacher answers: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newton's world endures beyond her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was seldom questioned. What was discussed, especially in the early years, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of art: something he often discussed 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 allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a running commentary on wealth, marriage, morals, class, the fall of the aristocracy and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a series of works that engage to great effect with the misuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly diagnosed mad and locked in a cell with an genuine lunatic who thinks he is in control of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the harsh illogicalities of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with wit and inflexibility with a