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All the finest playwrights extend the frontiers of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their unique fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric topics – ranging from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the puzzle of consciousness – and transform them into humorous, imaginative and regularly emotional theatrical works. Drama, Laurence Olivier noted, is a great glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Early Encounter

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a short talk on two audio dramas by a then unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer accumulated an ever escalating taxi-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 impressed by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was impeccably polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the workings of the media.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive combination of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a significant moral issue: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether principles followed an universal, God-given law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the topic of a talk being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the a library in London where he was clutching a mound of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became ever more visible. The breakthrough likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to restaging. It poses a multitude of queries such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of private derangement and whether ideas such as justice and national pride exist beyond our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened awareness of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and volition, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, functions because it is deeply emotional. Ideas and sentiment seamlessly merge in a segment where a gifted youth, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past civilisations to which her teacher replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the Newton's world endures beyond her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was seldom challenged. What was discussed, especially in the initial period, were his doubts about the power of art: something he frequently discussed in discussions. “I used to feel out on a limb,” 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 compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a continuous critique on finance, wedlock, morals, class, the decline of the nobility and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a series of works that grapple to great effect with the misuse of civil liberties by dictatorial systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly diagnosed insane and confined in a cell with an real lunatic who imagines himself in control of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the entire LSO on stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the brutal illogicalities of communist repression with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with irony and strictness with a