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Every one of the finest playwrights broaden the frontiers of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their unique way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric subjects – from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the puzzle of the mind – and convert them into clever, inventive and regularly moving plays. The stage, Laurence Olivier noted, is a powerful glamorizer of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Initial Discovery

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard early on. That was completely due to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a at that time unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer racked up an ever escalating taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was perfectly courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the ways of our world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances leading to our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the stillness, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive blend of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a big ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an absolute, God-given law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the focus of a speech being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was holding a stack of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With time, the emotional content of his plays became more and more visible. The key moment perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to restaging. It asks a plethora of issues such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of private derangement and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist beyond our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and volition, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is intensely emotional. Ideas and feeling perfectly merge in a moment where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, laments the loss of past civilisations to which her instructor responds: “Scientific insights seen briefly and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the Newtonian universe outlasts her unfortunately cut short life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was rarely questioned. What was discussed, particularly in the beginning, were his reservations about the effectiveness of drama: something he often talked about in interviews. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a ongoing observation on wealth, matrimony, morals, social class, the weakening of the nobility and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a series of works that grapple to significant impact with the abuse of civil liberties by authoritarian systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly diagnosed mad and confined in a cell with an real madman who imagines himself in command of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the full orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the brutal absurdities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with wit and rigidity with a