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All the great playwrights push the frontiers of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their unique fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric topics – from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the mystery of awareness – and turn them into witty, creative and regularly moving plays. Theatre, Laurence Olivier once said, is a powerful embellisher of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Early Encounter

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly thanks to Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a mini-speech on two radio plays by a at that time unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer accumulated an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was impeccably polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the nature of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by character and plot. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its ingenuity in constructing 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 causing our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The typical combination of intellectual audacity and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a significant moral issue: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules followed an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the focus of a talk being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the a library in London where he was clutching a stack of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly apparent. The breakthrough perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to revival. It raises a plethora of issues such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of individual madness and whether notions such as justice and national pride exist beyond our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened awareness of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and volition, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is deeply touching. Ideas and feeling perfectly merge in a moment where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past cultures to which her instructor answers: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her tragically cut short life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was seldom challenged. What was contested, especially in the initial period, were his doubts about the power of drama: something he often explored 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 hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a continuous critique on finance, wedlock, morals, social class, the fall of the upper class and the rise of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a number of works that grapple to significant impact with the misuse of human rights by oppressive systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic wrongly pronounced insane and confined in a chamber with an authentic psychiatric patient who imagines himself in charge of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the whole LSO on stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the harsh ridiculousness of communist repression with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with wit and strictness with a