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All the finest dramatists push the frontiers of drama. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their own manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure subjects – from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the enigma of consciousness – and convert them into witty, creative and regularly touching theatrical works. Theatre, Laurence Olivier noted, is a great glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Early Encounter

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to give a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a back then obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer racked up an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed perfectly gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the workings of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances leading to our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted 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 stillness, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The characteristic combination of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a big ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles obeyed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the topic of a talk being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with playwright 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 entrance of the London Library where he was clutching a mound of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became increasingly visible. The turning point perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to restaging. It asks a multitude of questions such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of individual madness and whether notions such as justice and national pride exist independent of our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and free will, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is deeply emotional. Ideas and feeling seamlessly coincide in a segment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, laments the loss of past civilisations to which her teacher answers: “Scientific insights seen briefly and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newton's world endures beyond her sadly cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was seldom questioned. What was debated, notably in the early years, were his doubts about the efficacy 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 jerk if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a ongoing observation on money, wedlock, ethics, social class, the fall of the upper class and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a collection of works that grapple to powerful results with the misuse of human rights by authoritarian governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist falsely diagnosed crazy and locked in a cell with an authentic lunatic who imagines himself in command of an symphony. It was startling both to see the full LSO on stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the harsh illogicalities of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with wit and strictness with a