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Every one of the outstanding dramatists push the frontiers of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their own way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric topics – ranging from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the enigma of consciousness – and transform them into witty, inventive and regularly emotional plays. Theatre, Laurence Olivier noted, is a great embellisher of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Introduction

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard early on. That was entirely because of Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to present a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a at that time little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer racked up an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the voice of the time. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed perfectly courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the workings of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the silence, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The typical blend of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a significant ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles followed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the topic of a talk being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs of the London Library where he was clutching a mound of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became increasingly visible. The key moment perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to revival. It raises a whole host of issues such as whether any social obligation is the result of personal instability and whether concepts such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and volition, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is deeply touching. Concepts and emotion perfectly merge in a segment where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past civilisations to which her tutor responds: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the classical physics endures beyond her sadly truncated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was rarely challenged. What was discussed, notably in the initial period, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of theatre: 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 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 says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a continuous critique on money, marriage, morals, social class, the decline of the aristocracy and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a series of works that engage to powerful results with the abuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist falsely declared mad and locked in a chamber with an real lunatic who thinks he is in charge of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the harsh absurdities of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with irony and inflexibility with a