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All the outstanding playwrights broaden the frontiers of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their own way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure subjects – ranging from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the enigma of the mind – and transform them into witty, creative and regularly moving dramas. Drama, Laurence Olivier noted, is a significant embellisher of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Initial Encounter

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a short talk on two audio dramas by a at that time little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer racked up an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was impeccably gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the nature of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances causing our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive blend of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a major moral issue: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an absolute, God-given law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the topic of a talk being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the London Library where he was holding a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became more and more evident. The key moment perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to revival. It raises a multitude of issues such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of private derangement and whether concepts such as fairness and patriotism exist beyond our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense awareness of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and free will, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is intensely touching. Thoughts and sentiment perfectly come together in a moment where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past civilisations to which her teacher answers: “Scientific insights caught sight of and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her unfortunately truncated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was seldom challenged. What was debated, notably in the initial period, were his reservations about the effectiveness of drama: something he frequently explored in interviews. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a continuous critique on money, marriage, ethics, status, the decline of the upper class and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a series of works that deal to great effect with the misuse of civil liberties by dictatorial regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident wrongly diagnosed insane and confined in a cell with an genuine madman who imagines himself in charge of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the harsh absurdities of communist repression with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with wit and strictness with a