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All the great dramatists broaden the limits of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their unique fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure topics – ranging from chaos theory to ethical thought and the mystery of consciousness – and turn them into humorous, inventive and frequently touching plays. Theatre, Laurence Olivier once said, is a significant glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Encounter

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly thanks to Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he asked me to present a mini-speech on two radio plays by a back then unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer racked up an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was impeccably courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the ways of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances resulting in our end. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “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 touching and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive fusion of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a big philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether principles obeyed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the subject of a talk being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood 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- agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the a library in London where he was gripping a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became ever more evident. The key moment perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to revival. It raises a whole host of questions such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of personal instability and whether notions such as justice and patriotism exist independent of our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute awareness of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and choice, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is deeply emotional. Thoughts and emotion flawlessly merge in a moment where a gifted youth, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past civilisations to which her tutor responds: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the Newton's world survives her tragically truncated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was seldom challenged. What was debated, particularly in the early years, were his doubts about the power of drama: something he often discussed in discussions. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a ongoing observation on money, wedlock, values, social class, the fall of the nobility and the rise of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a number of works that grapple to significant impact 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 showed a Soviet critic incorrectly declared crazy and locked in a cell with an genuine psychiatric patient who thinks he is in command of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the brutal absurdities of communist repression with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with irony and strictness with a