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All the finest playwrights extend the frontiers of drama. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their own fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric topics – from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the enigma of awareness – and convert them into witty, creative and often moving dramas. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a great embellisher of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Initial Encounter

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely because of Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to give a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a at that time unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer racked up an constantly rising taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed perfectly polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the ways of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances causing our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the stillness, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive fusion of daring ideas and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a major philosophical question: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules followed an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the focus of a lecture being developed by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was clutching a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became more and more evident. The key moment perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to reproduction. It raises a plethora of issues such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of personal instability and whether notions such as justice and patriotism exist outside our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened awareness of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is intensely moving. Ideas and feeling seamlessly coincide in a segment where a gifted youth, Thomasina, laments the loss of past cultures to which her teacher replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the classical physics endures beyond her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was seldom doubted. What was discussed, particularly in the beginning, were his doubts about the efficacy of theatre: something he frequently discussed in discussions. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a continuous critique on wealth, marriage, values, class, the weakening of the nobility and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a collection of works that engage to powerful results with the misuse of human rights by dictatorial regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic wrongly pronounced mad and confined in a room with an real madman who imagines himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the whole LSO on stage and to see Stoppard revealing the harsh absurdities of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with wit and inflexibility with a