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All the finest dramatists broaden the limits of drama. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their unique manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure topics – from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the puzzle of the mind – and convert them into humorous, creative and regularly emotional dramas. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a great glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Initial Discovery

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard early on. That was entirely because of Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to present a brief lecture on two radio plays by a at that time obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer racked up an constantly rising taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained exceptionally polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the ways of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was invariably 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 praised for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate 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 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 blend of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a big ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an absolute, God-given law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the subject of a speech being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the London Library where he was gripping a stack of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became more and more visible. The turning point arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It raises a multitude of queries such as whether any civic duty is the result of private derangement and whether ideas such as justice and national pride exist beyond our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened realization of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, works because it is deeply moving. Thoughts and sentiment perfectly come together in a segment where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past cultures to which her teacher responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the classical physics endures beyond her sadly truncated life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was infrequently challenged. What was contested, notably in the early years, were his skepticism about the power of art: something he regularly talked about in interviews. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a continuous critique on finance, marriage, morals, status, the decline of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a series of works that engage to great effect with the abuse of human rights by dictatorial governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident falsely diagnosed mad and imprisoned in a chamber with an genuine madman who imagines himself in charge of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the full orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the cruel ridiculousness of communist repression with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with wit and rigidity with a