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All the outstanding playwrights extend the frontiers of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their unique manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure subjects – from chaos theory to ethical thought and the puzzle of consciousness – and transform them into clever, inventive and regularly emotional plays. Drama, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a significant glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Discovery

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely thanks to Philip French, who, besides 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 then unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer accumulated an constantly rising taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was perfectly polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the ways of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by character and plot. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances causing our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed 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 stillness, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic combination of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a significant moral issue: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles adhered to an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the focus of a speech being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Breakthrough

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

With time, the emotional content of his plays became ever more visible. The key moment arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It poses a multitude of queries such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of private derangement and whether concepts such as justice and national pride exist outside our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened realization of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and free will, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, works because it is profoundly touching. Ideas and emotion flawlessly coincide in a scene where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, laments the loss of past civilisations to which her instructor answers: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newton's world endures beyond her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was rarely doubted. What was debated, especially in the initial period, were his reservations about the effectiveness of art: something he frequently explored 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 housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a running commentary on wealth, marriage, values, social class, the decline of the nobility and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a number of works that engage to great effect with the abuse of civil liberties by oppressive regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly declared insane and locked in a cell with an authentic lunatic who imagines himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the full LSO on the stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the harsh illogicalities of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and strictness with a