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Every one of the outstanding playwrights push the boundaries of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their distinct way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized themes – from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the mystery of consciousness – and convert them into humorous, imaginative and frequently touching plays. Drama, the actor Olivier once said, is a significant glamoriser of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Initial Discovery

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard early on. That was wholly thanks to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to present a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a back then unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer racked up an ever escalating cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed impeccably courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the workings of our world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances leading to our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language 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 distinctive combination of daring ideas and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a significant philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an absolute, God-given law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the topic of a lecture being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the London Library where he was holding 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 apparent. The key moment likely came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It asks a multitude of questions such as whether any public commitment is the result of private derangement and whether ideas such as fairness and national pride exist outside our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is deeply emotional. Thoughts and emotion flawlessly come together in a scene where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past cultures to which her tutor responds: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the Newton's world survives her sadly truncated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was seldom challenged. What was debated, particularly in the early years, were his doubts about the power of art: something he frequently explored in interviews. “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 social 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 believe he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a continuous critique on wealth, matrimony, ethics, social class, the decline of the nobility and the dominance of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a series of works that deal to great effect with the misuse of individual freedoms by authoritarian governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic incorrectly pronounced crazy and locked in a room with an genuine madman who believes himself in control of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the brutal ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with irony and inflexibility with a