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All the finest dramatists extend the limits of drama. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their distinct fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric themes – from chaos theory to ethical thought and the mystery of awareness – and turn them into humorous, creative and frequently emotional dramas. The stage, the actor Olivier remarked, is a powerful glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Initial Discovery

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard early on. That was completely due to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a short talk on two broadcast plays by a then little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer accumulated an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was exceptionally courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the ways of the media.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances leading to our demise. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the stillness, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic combination of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a big philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules followed an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the topic of a lecture being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the London Library where he was clutching a mound of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became ever more evident. The turning point arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to reproduction. It poses a plethora of questions such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of personal instability and whether notions such as justice and patriotism exist outside our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened consciousness of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, functions because it is intensely moving. Ideas and emotion seamlessly come together in a segment where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, laments the loss of past civilizations to which her instructor answers: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the classical physics outlasts her unfortunately cut short life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was rarely doubted. What was discussed, especially in the early years, were his reservations about the efficacy of art: something he regularly discussed in discussions. “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 the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a running commentary on finance, matrimony, values, class, the decline of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a number of works that deal to significant impact with the violation of human rights by dictatorial systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident wrongly declared insane and imprisoned in a chamber with an genuine madman who believes himself in charge of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the full LSO on the stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the harsh absurdities of communist repression with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a