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All the great dramatists push the frontiers of drama. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their own fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric themes – from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the enigma of consciousness – and convert them into humorous, inventive and regularly moving dramas. Drama, the actor Olivier remarked, is a significant embellisher of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Initial Discovery

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was completely due to Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a at that time unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer racked up an constantly rising cab 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 struck by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was perfectly courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the workings of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances causing 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 language is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic blend of daring ideas and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a big philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules followed an universal, God-given law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the topic of a speech being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was holding a pile of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly evident. The key moment arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to reproduction. It poses a whole host of queries such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of private derangement and whether concepts such as justice and national pride exist outside our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute awareness of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, works because it is deeply emotional. Concepts and feeling flawlessly merge in a segment where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, laments the loss of past civilisations to which her teacher responds: “Scientific insights caught sight of and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newton's world outlasts her tragically abbreviated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was rarely questioned. What was contested, notably in the early years, were his doubts about the efficacy of drama: something he often explored in interviews. “I used to feel out on a limb,” 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 significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a continuous critique on finance, marriage, values, social class, the fall of the upper class and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a series of works that grapple 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 showed a Eastern Bloc activist falsely declared mad and confined in a cell with an authentic lunatic who thinks he is in charge of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the full LSO on stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the harsh absurdities of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and strictness with a