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Every one of the finest playwrights broaden the frontiers of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their distinct fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric topics – from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the enigma of consciousness – and transform them into clever, imaginative and frequently moving plays. Drama, the actor Olivier noted, is a powerful glamoriser of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Early Encounter

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard early on. That was wholly due to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he invited me to present a mini-speech on two radio plays by a then little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer racked up an skyrocketing cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed perfectly gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the ways of our world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the stillness, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive fusion of daring ideas and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a big ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an universal, God-given law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the subject of a lecture being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a previous agriculture minister 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 complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the London Library where he was gripping a stack of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became more and more apparent. The turning point perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to reproduction. It poses a whole host of questions such as whether any civic duty is the result of private derangement and whether notions such as justice and national pride exist outside our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense realization of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and free will, classicism and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is intensely touching. Ideas and sentiment seamlessly coincide in a scene where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past civilisations to which her teacher responds: “Scientific insights glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newton's world outlasts her tragically cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was seldom doubted. What was debated, particularly in the beginning, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of theatre: something he frequently discussed in discussions. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a running commentary on money, matrimony, ethics, social class, the decline of the upper class and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a series of works that engage to great effect with the violation of human rights by oppressive regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly declared insane and locked in a room with an real madman who thinks he is in command of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the whole orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the harsh ridiculousness of communist repression with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a