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All the finest playwrights broaden the frontiers of drama. Beckett and Pinter did it in their distinct manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure topics – ranging from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the enigma of the mind – and transform them into humorous, inventive and frequently emotional theatrical works. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a great glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Introduction

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard early on. That was completely thanks to Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to give a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a then little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer racked up an ever escalating cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed impeccably polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the ways of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances causing our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the silence, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The characteristic blend of intellectual audacity and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a major moral issue: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles obeyed an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the topic of a speech being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was holding a mound of books that rose 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 evident. The breakthrough arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It poses a whole host of queries such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of personal instability and whether concepts such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and volition, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly emotional. Concepts and emotion seamlessly coincide in a segment where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, laments the loss of past civilisations to which her tutor replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the Newtonian universe outlasts her unfortunately cut short life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was rarely doubted. What was discussed, particularly in the early years, were his skepticism about the power of art: something he regularly explored in discussions. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a continuous critique on finance, matrimony, morals, social class, the fall of the nobility and the rise of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a series of works that grapple to powerful results with the misuse of individual freedoms by authoritarian governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic falsely pronounced crazy and locked in a chamber with an authentic madman who thinks he is in control of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the brutal absurdities of communist repression with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with wit and inflexibility with a