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All the great dramatists push the frontiers of theatre. Beckett and Pinter did it in their distinct way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure topics – from chaos theory to ethical thought and the puzzle of the mind – and convert them into humorous, imaginative and regularly touching theatrical works. Drama, the actor Olivier noted, is a great embellisher of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Encounter

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely due to Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a back then obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer ran up an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed exceptionally courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the workings of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by character and plot. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances leading to our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the silence, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The typical combination of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a big moral issue: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether principles adhered to an unchanging, God-given law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the focus of a speech being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the anguish of a fractured marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the steps 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 answered.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became more and more visible. The breakthrough likely came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to revival. It asks a multitude of queries such as whether any civic duty is the result of individual madness and whether notions such as justice and patriotism exist beyond our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened realization of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and free will, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, works because it is deeply touching. Ideas and emotion seamlessly merge in a moment where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past cultures to which her tutor responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the Newton's world endures beyond her tragically abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was infrequently challenged. What was discussed, notably in the initial period, were his skepticism about the power of drama: something he frequently explored in discussions. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a ongoing observation on finance, matrimony, ethics, social class, the fall of the nobility and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a number of works that grapple to significant impact with the misuse of individual freedoms by authoritarian regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist falsely declared crazy and confined in a chamber with an real madman who imagines himself in command of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the full orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the harsh absurdities of communist repression with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with irony and inflexibility with a