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All the outstanding playwrights push the boundaries of drama. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their unique fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric topics – from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the puzzle of awareness – and convert them into witty, imaginative and frequently emotional theatrical works. Drama, the actor Olivier noted, is a significant embellisher of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Early Discovery

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard early on. That was entirely because of Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to present a brief lecture on two radio plays by a then unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer ran up an constantly rising cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the voice of the time. I was impressed by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of The 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 our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances causing our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the silence, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The distinctive combination of intellectual audacity and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a big philosophical question: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether principles obeyed an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the subject of a lecture being developed by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Emotional Revelation

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 investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the London Library where he was clutching a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the feeling of his plays became increasingly visible. The turning point likely came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It asks a multitude of issues such as whether any social obligation is the result of personal instability and whether concepts such as justice and patriotism exist outside our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute consciousness of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and volition, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, works because it is deeply moving. Concepts and emotion flawlessly coincide in a segment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past cultures to which her tutor replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the Newton's world survives her sadly cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was rarely questioned. What was debated, especially in the early years, were his skepticism about the power of art: something he often talked about in discussions. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no qualms 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 Wilde’s play offers a continuous critique on finance, wedlock, morals, social class, the weakening of the upper class and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a collection of works that engage to significant impact with the abuse of human rights by authoritarian governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist falsely diagnosed crazy and imprisoned in a room with an real madman who believes himself in control of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the entire orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the cruel illogicalities of communist repression with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with irony and inflexibility with a