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All the great dramatists push the frontiers of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their own fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized subjects – from chaos theory to ethical thought and the enigma of awareness – and transform them into humorous, inventive and often emotional plays. The stage, the actor Olivier noted, is a significant glamoriser of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Early Discovery

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard early on. That was entirely thanks to Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a back then unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer racked up an ever escalating taxi-fare. 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 cleverness of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained perfectly polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the nature of our world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by character and plot. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the quiet, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The distinctive blend of daring ideas and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a major ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles adhered to an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the focus of a lecture being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the entrance of the London Library where he was clutching a mound of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became more and more evident. The turning point perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to revival. It asks a plethora of questions such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of individual madness and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense consciousness of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and volition, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a host of other things, functions because it is deeply touching. Ideas and sentiment flawlessly coincide in a moment where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past civilisations to which her teacher answers: “Scientific insights seen briefly and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the Newton's world outlasts her unfortunately cut short life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was rarely challenged. What was discussed, especially in the beginning, were his doubts about the effectiveness of drama: 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 housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a ongoing observation on finance, wedlock, values, social class, the weakening of the aristocracy and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a collection of works that grapple to great effect with the violation of individual freedoms by dictatorial regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly diagnosed crazy and confined in a room with an genuine lunatic who imagines himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the brutal absurdities of communist repression with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a