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All the great playwrights extend the frontiers of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their own manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric topics – from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of consciousness – and convert them into humorous, inventive and regularly moving theatrical works. The stage, Laurence Olivier noted, is a significant glamoriser of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Early Discovery

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely due to Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to present a short talk on two audio dramas by a at that time little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer racked up an ever escalating taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was perfectly polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the ways of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we belatedly 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 commended for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic blend of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a major ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether principles followed an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your average dramatic theme, 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 understood that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the a library in London where he was clutching a pile of books that came 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 turning point arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It raises a plethora of issues such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of private derangement and whether concepts such as justice and national pride exist beyond our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute consciousness of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and volition, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is deeply emotional. Concepts and emotion flawlessly merge in a scene where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past civilisations to which her teacher replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the Newton's world survives her unfortunately truncated life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

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

I believe he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a continuous critique on wealth, marriage, values, social class, the fall of the upper class and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a series of works that grapple to powerful results with the abuse of human rights by authoritarian regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly diagnosed insane and confined in a cell with an genuine lunatic who imagines himself in charge of an symphony. It was startling both to see the full orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the cruel absurdities of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a