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All the outstanding dramatists broaden the limits of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their distinct fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric themes – ranging from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the puzzle of consciousness – and turn them into witty, inventive and often moving dramas. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a significant embellisher of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Initial Discovery

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely thanks to Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a mini-speech on two radio plays by a then unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer accumulated an ever escalating cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained perfectly courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the nature of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances leading to our demise. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the quiet, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The distinctive blend of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a major philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an absolute, God-given law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the subject of a lecture being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs of the London Library where he was clutching a mound of books that reached up 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 breakthrough perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to revival. It poses a plethora of queries such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of personal instability and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist outside our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense realization of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and free will, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly touching. Thoughts and emotion seamlessly coincide in a moment where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past cultures to which her instructor responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the classical physics outlasts her sadly truncated life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was infrequently questioned. What was discussed, notably in the beginning, were his doubts about the efficacy of theatre: something he frequently discussed in interviews. “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 the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a running commentary on wealth, matrimony, ethics, status, the decline of the upper class and the dominance of business. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a collection of works that deal to significant impact with the misuse of civil liberties by oppressive systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic falsely declared insane and locked in a room with an authentic lunatic who thinks he is in control of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the cruel illogicalities of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with wit and rigidity with a