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Every one of the finest playwrights push the frontiers of drama. Beckett and Pinter did it in their unique fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure topics – from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the mystery of consciousness – and convert them into clever, inventive and often emotional plays. The stage, Laurence Olivier noted, is a powerful glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Discovery

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard early on. That was completely because of a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a then unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer accumulated an ever escalating 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 speaking clock. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet 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 opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed perfectly courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the nature of our world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its cleverness 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 chance circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the quiet, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The distinctive combination of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a major philosophical question: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions followed an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the topic of a speech being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the perils of a disintegrating 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 playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was clutching a mound of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became increasingly visible. The key moment likely came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It raises a plethora of queries such as whether any public commitment is the result of individual madness and whether concepts such as fairness and national pride exist outside our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened consciousness of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, works because it is deeply moving. Ideas and feeling seamlessly come together in a moment where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past civilisations to which her teacher replies: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe outlasts her sadly abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was infrequently doubted. What was debated, notably in the initial period, were his doubts about the power of theatre: something he regularly talked about in interviews. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a continuous critique on money, wedlock, ethics, status, the weakening of the aristocracy and the rise of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a number of works that deal to great effect with the misuse of individual freedoms by oppressive regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident incorrectly diagnosed crazy and confined in a chamber with an genuine psychiatric patient who thinks he is in charge of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the cruel illogicalities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with irony and rigidity with a