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All the great playwrights extend the frontiers of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their distinct manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric themes – from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the enigma of consciousness – and transform them into humorous, inventive and frequently touching dramas. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a great glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Discovery

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly because of a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to give a short talk on two audio dramas by a back then little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer ran up an constantly rising taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with 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 gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was impeccably polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the workings of the media.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the quiet, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive blend of daring ideas and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a big philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules followed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the focus of a speech being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the London Library where he was gripping a pile of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became ever more apparent. The turning point arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to revival. It asks a multitude of questions such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of private derangement and whether concepts such as fairness and national pride exist beyond our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute realization of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and free will, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, works because it is deeply emotional. Concepts and feeling perfectly come together in a segment where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past civilizations to which her tutor replies: “Scientific insights seen briefly and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newton's world survives her unfortunately cut short life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was infrequently questioned. What was contested, particularly in the early years, were his skepticism about the efficacy of theatre: 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 social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a ongoing observation on wealth, marriage, morals, status, the decline of the aristocracy and the rise of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a series of works that grapple to powerful results with the misuse of human rights by authoritarian systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident falsely declared mad and locked in a cell with an authentic madman who believes himself in command of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the cruel illogicalities of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a