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Every one of the great playwrights broaden the frontiers of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their distinct fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric subjects – ranging from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the puzzle of the mind – and turn them into humorous, inventive and regularly touching dramas. Drama, the actor Olivier once said, is a great glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Early Encounter

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard early on. That was entirely thanks to Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he asked me to present a short talk on two audio dramas by a back then unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer ran up an constantly rising taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed impeccably polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the ways of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances leading to our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the silence, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The characteristic combination of intellectual audacity and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a major ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the focus of a speech being developed by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open 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 clutching a mound of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With time, the emotional content of his plays became ever more apparent. The breakthrough likely came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to reproduction. It raises a whole host of queries such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of individual madness and whether ideas such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and choice, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is profoundly emotional. Ideas and feeling seamlessly come together in a scene where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past civilizations to which her instructor answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her tragically cut short life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was infrequently challenged. What was discussed, notably in the initial period, were his doubts about the power of art: something he often discussed in discussions. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a ongoing observation on money, marriage, ethics, social class, the weakening of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a series of works that engage to significant impact with the violation of individual freedoms by authoritarian systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist falsely pronounced mad and confined in a room with an genuine psychiatric patient who thinks he is in control of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the cruel absurdities of communist repression with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with irony and inflexibility with a