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All the finest dramatists push the frontiers of theatre. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their own fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure subjects – from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of awareness – and convert them into clever, creative and often emotional dramas. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a powerful glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Early Discovery

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely due to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a short talk on two radio plays by a back then unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer accumulated an ever escalating cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was perfectly polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the workings of our world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by character and plot. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances causing our end. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the silence, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The distinctive combination of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a significant philosophical question: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether principles followed an universal, God-given law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the subject of a speech being developed by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the London Library where he was gripping a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly evident. The breakthrough arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to reproduction. It poses a multitude of questions such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of individual madness and whether concepts such as justice and national pride exist independent of our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened awareness of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and volition, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, works because it is intensely touching. Concepts and emotion flawlessly come together in a scene where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, laments the loss of past civilisations to which her instructor answers: “Scientific insights seen briefly and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the Newtonian universe outlasts her sadly cut short life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was seldom challenged. What was discussed, particularly in the beginning, were his doubts about the effectiveness of theatre: something he regularly talked about in conversations. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To avert indirectly 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 presents a continuous critique on wealth, marriage, morals, social class, the weakening of the upper class and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a number of works that grapple to significant impact with the abuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly declared mad and imprisoned in a chamber with an authentic lunatic who imagines himself in command of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the cruel absurdities of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a