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Every one of the great dramatists push the frontiers of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their unique fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure themes – from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of consciousness – and convert them into humorous, inventive and regularly emotional theatrical works. The stage, the actor Olivier remarked, is a significant embellisher of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Early Discovery

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard early on. That was wholly due to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to give a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a at that time obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer accumulated an constantly rising cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated 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 appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was perfectly gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the nature of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we in time 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 multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances leading to our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the quiet, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive blend of conceptual boldness and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a significant philosophical question: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules followed an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the topic of a lecture being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – 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 carefully researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was holding a stack of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With time, the emotional content of his plays became more and more visible. The turning point likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to restaging. It raises a whole host of questions such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of individual madness and whether concepts such as fairness and patriotism exist beyond our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened consciousness of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and volition, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is deeply emotional. Ideas and feeling seamlessly come together in a moment where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, laments the demise of past civilisations to which her tutor replies: “Scientific insights caught sight of and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the classical physics endures beyond her sadly abbreviated life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was rarely challenged. What was discussed, especially in the beginning, were his reservations about the effectiveness of drama: something he often discussed in conversations. “I used to feel alone,” 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 qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a ongoing observation on wealth, marriage, values, class, the fall of the aristocracy and the rise of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a series of works that grapple to great effect with the violation of civil liberties by dictatorial regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic falsely declared insane and imprisoned in a room with an genuine psychiatric patient who believes himself in control of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the whole LSO on the stage and to see Stoppard exposing the harsh illogicalities of communist repression with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with irony and strictness with a