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All the outstanding playwrights push the boundaries of theatre. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their unique way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric subjects – ranging from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the puzzle of consciousness – and transform them into witty, inventive and regularly touching plays. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a significant glamoriser of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Encounter

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely due to Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to give a short talk on two radio plays by a then unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, 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 voice of the time. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained impeccably courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the nature of our world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we belatedly 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 intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances resulting in our end. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the silence, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive fusion of intellectual audacity and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a big ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the focus of a speech being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs 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 answered.

With the passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became ever more apparent. The turning point perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It raises a whole host of queries such as whether any civic duty is the result of private derangement and whether concepts such as fairness and national pride exist beyond our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened consciousness of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, works because it is deeply moving. Ideas and emotion flawlessly merge in a segment where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past civilisations to which her tutor replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newton's world survives her sadly abbreviated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was seldom challenged. What was debated, especially in the beginning, were his doubts about the power of art: something he frequently talked about in conversations. “I used to feel alone,” 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 hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a ongoing observation on finance, matrimony, values, class, the decline of the upper class and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a collection of works that engage to powerful results with the abuse of civil liberties by authoritarian governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly pronounced insane and locked in a room with an authentic madman who imagines himself in command of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the whole LSO on the stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the brutal ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with irony and inflexibility with a