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All the great dramatists push the frontiers of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their distinct way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure themes – from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the puzzle of consciousness – and convert them into witty, creative and regularly touching theatrical works. The stage, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a powerful embellisher of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Discovery

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely due to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to give a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a then obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer ran up an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace 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 today adore – he remained impeccably gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the workings of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all casualties 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 silence, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive blend of intellectual audacity and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a major philosophical question: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules followed an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the focus of a lecture being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the London Library where he was clutching a pile of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became more and more evident. The key moment likely came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to restaging. It asks a multitude of issues such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of private derangement and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense realization of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and free will, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, works because it is profoundly emotional. Ideas and sentiment perfectly come together in a scene where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past civilisations to which her teacher responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe outlasts her sadly cut short life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was infrequently doubted. What was discussed, particularly in the early years, were his reservations about the efficacy of drama: something he regularly explored in conversations. “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 social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a continuous critique on finance, marriage, ethics, status, the decline of the nobility and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a number of works that grapple to powerful results with the abuse of human rights by authoritarian governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist falsely pronounced insane and confined in a cell with an authentic lunatic who believes himself in command of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the cruel illogicalities of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “force is met with wit and strictness with a