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All the finest playwrights broaden the frontiers of theatre. Beckett and Pinter did it in their own manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric themes – from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the puzzle of consciousness – and convert them into humorous, creative and regularly moving theatrical works. Drama, the actor Olivier noted, is a great embellisher of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Initial Discovery

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely due to Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to present a brief lecture on two radio plays by a at that time little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer accumulated an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained exceptionally polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the nature of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by character and plot. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances causing our demise. 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 dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the silence, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The typical blend of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a significant moral issue: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles followed an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the focus of a speech being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the London Library where he was clutching a mound of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became more and more visible. The key moment arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to restaging. It raises a multitude of queries such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of personal instability and whether notions such as justice and national pride exist independent of our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened consciousness of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, functions because it is profoundly touching. Ideas and emotion perfectly come together in a moment where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past civilizations to which her instructor responds: “Scientific insights glimpsed and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her sadly cut short life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was infrequently challenged. What was discussed, particularly in the beginning, were his doubts about the efficacy of art: something he frequently talked about in discussions. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social 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 believe he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a running commentary on finance, matrimony, values, social class, the fall of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a collection of works that engage to powerful results with the abuse of civil liberties by oppressive governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic wrongly pronounced crazy and locked in a cell with an real madman who believes himself in control of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the entire LSO on stage and to see Stoppard revealing the brutal illogicalities of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with irony and strictness with a