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All the finest playwrights broaden the boundaries of drama. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their distinct fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric topics – ranging from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the enigma of awareness – and convert them into witty, inventive and frequently moving dramas. The stage, Laurence Olivier noted, is a significant glamoriser of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Early Discovery

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly due to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a at that time little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer ran up an ever escalating cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated 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 gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained exceptionally gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the nature of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the stillness, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive blend of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a significant ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the subject of a talk being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the London Library where he was holding a mound of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the years, the feeling of his plays became more and more apparent. The turning point arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to revival. It poses a multitude of issues such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of private derangement and whether concepts such as justice and national pride exist beyond our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute awareness of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and volition, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, functions because it is intensely emotional. Concepts and sentiment seamlessly merge in a moment where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past civilisations to which her instructor answers: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the Newton's world survives her sadly abbreviated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was seldom questioned. What was discussed, notably in the beginning, were his reservations about the power of drama: something he often talked about in conversations. “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 Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a continuous critique on money, wedlock, values, class, the fall of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a collection of works that grapple to significant impact with the abuse of human rights by dictatorial governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident incorrectly declared mad and imprisoned in a chamber with an genuine lunatic who imagines himself in control of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the whole LSO on stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the harsh absurdities of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “force is met with irony and rigidity with a