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All the great playwrights push the frontiers of drama. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their unique manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure topics – ranging from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the mystery of awareness – and turn them into clever, imaginative and often touching plays. Theatre, the actor Olivier once said, is a great embellisher of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Early Encounter

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard early on. That was wholly due to Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to present a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a then unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer ran 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 captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained exceptionally gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the nature of our world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the stillness, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The typical fusion of daring ideas and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a big philosophical question: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the topic of a lecture being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously 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 rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the years, the feeling of his plays became ever more apparent. The turning point perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to restaging. It raises a multitude of issues such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of individual madness and whether ideas such as justice and national pride exist beyond our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense consciousness of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and free will, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is intensely moving. Thoughts and emotion seamlessly merge in a segment where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, laments the demise of past cultures to which her instructor answers: “Scientific insights glimpsed and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the classical physics endures beyond her unfortunately truncated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was rarely challenged. What was contested, particularly in the initial period, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of art: something he frequently talked about in interviews. “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 Vietnam or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a ongoing observation on finance, matrimony, ethics, social class, the weakening of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a number of works that deal to significant impact with the violation of individual freedoms by authoritarian regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly declared mad and confined in a room with an authentic lunatic who imagines himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the full LSO on the stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the brutal illogicalities of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with irony and rigidity with a