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All the great dramatists extend the frontiers of theatre. Beckett and Pinter did it in their own fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric subjects – from chaos theory to ethical thought and the mystery of consciousness – and transform them into witty, creative and often moving plays. The stage, the actor Olivier once said, is a significant glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Discovery

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to present a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a then unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer racked up an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It is telling 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 currently admire – he stayed perfectly courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the nature of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The distinctive blend of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a significant moral issue: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the subject of a lecture being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the London Library where he was clutching a pile of books that came 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 visible. The turning point perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to restaging. It asks a whole host of questions such as whether any social obligation is the result of personal instability and whether concepts such as justice and national pride exist independent of our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute realization of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and volition, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is deeply touching. Ideas and sentiment flawlessly coincide in a moment where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, laments the loss of past civilisations to which her tutor answers: “Scientific insights glimpsed and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the Newton's world endures beyond her sadly truncated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was seldom challenged. What was discussed, notably in the early years, were his reservations about the effectiveness of drama: something he frequently talked about in interviews. “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 the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a continuous critique on money, matrimony, morals, class, the weakening of the upper class and the rise of business. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a collection of works that engage to significant impact with the misuse of human rights by oppressive systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly declared mad and confined in a chamber with an real madman who imagines himself in control of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the whole LSO on stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the harsh ridiculousness of communist repression with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with irony and strictness with a