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All the great playwrights broaden the limits of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their distinct manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure topics – from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the mystery of consciousness – and convert them into clever, creative and regularly emotional dramas. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a powerful glamoriser of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Encounter

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard early on. That was completely due to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he invited me to present a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a then unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer ran up an constantly rising taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator 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 is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was impeccably gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the workings of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances leading to our end. I remember the actor 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 beating back the stillness, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic combination of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a big ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the subject of a talk being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was gripping a mound of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With time, the feeling of his plays became more and more evident. The breakthrough perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It poses a plethora of issues such as whether any public commitment is the result of private derangement and whether notions such as justice and patriotism exist independent of our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense realization of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, works because it is deeply touching. Ideas and emotion seamlessly merge in a scene where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past civilizations to which her teacher responds: “Scientific insights glimpsed and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the Newton's world survives her sadly cut short life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was infrequently doubted. What was discussed, particularly in the early years, were his reservations about the power of theatre: 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 jerk if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a running commentary on money, wedlock, morals, social class, the weakening of the nobility and the rise of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a collection of works that deal to powerful results with the violation of individual freedoms by authoritarian regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly pronounced mad and imprisoned in a room with an authentic psychiatric patient who thinks he is in charge of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the brutal illogicalities of communist repression with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “force is met with wit and strictness with a