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Every one of the outstanding playwrights push the frontiers of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their unique way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric subjects – ranging from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of consciousness – and transform them into clever, inventive and often emotional plays. Theatre, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a great glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Early Discovery

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard early on. That was wholly due to Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to give a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a at that time obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer racked up an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was exceptionally polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the workings of the media.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the quiet, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The typical blend of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a big moral issue: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an absolute, God-given law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the focus of a speech being developed by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the London Library where he was holding a mound of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With time, the emotional content of his plays became more and more evident. The breakthrough likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to revival. It asks a multitude of questions such as whether any civic duty is the result of private derangement and whether concepts such as justice and patriotism exist beyond our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened realization of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and choice, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, functions because it is intensely touching. Thoughts and feeling perfectly come together in a segment where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, laments the loss of past civilisations to which her tutor responds: “Scientific insights seen briefly and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the Newton's world outlasts her sadly cut short life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was seldom challenged. What was debated, notably in the beginning, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of drama: something he often talked about in conversations. “I used to feel alone,” 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 social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a running commentary on finance, wedlock, morals, status, the decline of the aristocracy and the rise of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a series of works that grapple to great effect with the abuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly diagnosed crazy and locked in a room with an authentic madman who believes himself in control of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the full LSO on the stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the cruel absurdities of communist repression with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “force is met with wit and inflexibility with a