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Every one of the great playwrights broaden the frontiers of drama. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their distinct way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric themes – from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the enigma of awareness – and convert them into clever, creative and often moving plays. Drama, Laurence Olivier noted, is a significant embellisher of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Initial Encounter

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely thanks to Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a short talk on two radio plays by a at that time little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer ran up an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and got to meet 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 critical first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed exceptionally courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the workings of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we eventually 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 indicate that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances causing our end. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the stillness, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive combination of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a big ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules followed an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the subject of a speech being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was gripping a mound of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the feeling of his plays became increasingly evident. The breakthrough likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to revival. It asks a multitude of questions such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of individual madness and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened consciousness of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and choice, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, works because it is profoundly touching. Ideas and feeling seamlessly come together in a moment where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past civilisations to which her teacher responds: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the Newton's world endures beyond her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was infrequently doubted. What was debated, especially in the beginning, were his doubts about the effectiveness of drama: something he frequently explored in interviews. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a running commentary on finance, marriage, morals, status, the decline of the upper class and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a number of works that deal to powerful results with the misuse of civil liberties by authoritarian regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic wrongly declared insane and locked in a room with an authentic psychiatric patient who imagines himself in control of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the whole LSO on stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the brutal absurdities of communist repression with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a