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All the outstanding playwrights broaden the frontiers of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their own way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure topics – from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the enigma of awareness – and turn them into witty, imaginative and frequently emotional plays. Theatre, the actor Olivier noted, is a significant embellisher of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Early Discovery

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely due to Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to present a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a at that time little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer racked up an ever escalating 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 ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed exceptionally gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the ways of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances causing our demise. 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 word is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive fusion of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a big philosophical question: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether principles followed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the topic of a speech being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was holding a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With time, the feeling of his plays became ever more evident. The breakthrough perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It asks a multitude of issues such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of individual madness and whether concepts such as fairness and national pride exist beyond our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute awareness of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and volition, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly moving. Ideas and feeling seamlessly merge in a segment where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, laments the loss of past civilisations to which her teacher responds: “Scientific insights glimpsed and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the classical physics survives her tragically abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was rarely challenged. What was contested, notably in the early years, were his reservations about the effectiveness of art: something he regularly talked about in discussions. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no hesitation 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 Oscar Wilde's work provides a running commentary on finance, wedlock, morals, class, the decline of the nobility and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a series of works that grapple to powerful results with the misuse of civil liberties by dictatorial regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident incorrectly pronounced mad and imprisoned in a chamber with an authentic lunatic who believes himself in control of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the brutal ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with irony and strictness with a