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Every one of the outstanding playwrights extend the frontiers of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their own fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized themes – from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the mystery of consciousness – and turn them into witty, inventive and frequently moving plays. Theatre, the actor Olivier once said, is a powerful glamoriser of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Early Discovery

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard early on. That was wholly due to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to present a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a back then unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer ran up an constantly rising taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed exceptionally gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the workings of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, 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 ingenuity in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances causing our end. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the quiet, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The distinctive fusion of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a big moral issue: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles obeyed an absolute, God-given law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the subject of a speech being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the entrance of the London Library where he was gripping a pile of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became more and more evident. The breakthrough perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to reproduction. It poses a plethora of queries such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of individual madness and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense awareness of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, works because it is profoundly touching. Ideas and sentiment perfectly merge in a scene where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past cultures to which her teacher answers: “Scientific insights glimpsed and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newton's world endures beyond her sadly cut short life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was infrequently doubted. What was debated, especially in the initial period, were his doubts about the efficacy of drama: something he frequently talked about in discussions. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a running commentary on finance, matrimony, morals, social class, the fall of the aristocracy and the dominance of business. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a number of works that engage to significant impact with the misuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident incorrectly diagnosed crazy and imprisoned in a room with an authentic psychiatric patient who imagines himself in control of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the full LSO on the stage and to see Stoppard exposing the brutal absurdities of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with irony and rigidity with a