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All the finest playwrights broaden the frontiers of theatre. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their own fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric themes – from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of consciousness – and transform them into humorous, creative and often emotional theatrical works. Drama, the actor Olivier noted, is a great glamoriser of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Initial Discovery

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly because of a man named Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to give a brief lecture on two radio plays by a back then unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer accumulated an ever escalating cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was exceptionally gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the workings of our world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances causing our end. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the silence, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic fusion of daring ideas and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a big philosophical question: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles obeyed an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the topic of a lecture being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the London Library where he was gripping a stack 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 evident. The key moment arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It raises a plethora of issues such as whether any social obligation is the result of individual madness and whether ideas such as justice and national pride exist beyond our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and free will, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, works because it is intensely emotional. Concepts and emotion flawlessly coincide in a scene where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, laments the demise of past civilisations to which her teacher answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the Newton's world endures beyond her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was seldom challenged. What was contested, particularly in the beginning, were his reservations about the power of drama: something he often 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 social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a continuous critique on wealth, wedlock, values, social class, the fall of the nobility and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a number of works that deal to great effect with the misuse of human rights by dictatorial systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic wrongly diagnosed insane and confined in a room with an real lunatic who thinks he is in charge of an symphony. It was startling both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the harsh illogicalities of communist repression with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with wit and strictness with a