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Every one of the outstanding playwrights broaden the limits of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their distinct manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure subjects – ranging from chaos theory to ethical thought and the mystery of consciousness – and transform them into humorous, creative and regularly moving plays. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a powerful embellisher of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Initial Discovery

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly thanks to Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to present a short talk on two audio dramas by a back then little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer ran up an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained perfectly gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the workings of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by character and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances causing our end. 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 pushing back the stillness, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic combination of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a significant philosophical question: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the subject of a lecture being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the London Library where he was gripping a mound of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became ever more evident. The turning point perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It asks a plethora of queries such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of personal instability and whether concepts such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute realization of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and volition, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, functions because it is deeply emotional. Ideas and sentiment seamlessly merge in a segment where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, laments the loss of past cultures to which her teacher answers: “Scientific insights caught sight of and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the Newton's world survives her tragically cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was rarely challenged. What was contested, notably in the early years, were his skepticism about the efficacy of art: something he regularly discussed in conversations. “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 qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a continuous critique on money, marriage, values, class, the decline of the aristocracy and the rise of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a number of works that deal to powerful results with the violation of individual freedoms by oppressive systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly pronounced insane and confined in a cell with an genuine lunatic who believes himself in charge of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the brutal absurdities of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with irony and strictness with a