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All the outstanding dramatists extend the limits of theatre. Beckett and Pinter did it in their distinct manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric topics – from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the puzzle of the mind – and transform them into clever, imaginative and frequently moving dramas. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a significant glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Initial Encounter

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard early on. That was wholly due to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a short talk on two broadcast plays by a back then unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer racked up an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet 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 sniffy first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed exceptionally gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the nature of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, 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 ingenuity in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances resulting in our demise. 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 language is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The typical fusion of conceptual boldness and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a big moral issue: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether principles followed an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the focus of a lecture being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the a library in London 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 emotional content of his plays became ever more evident. The turning point arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to revival. It poses a whole host of questions such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of private derangement and whether ideas such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute awareness of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and choice, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is intensely moving. Concepts and emotion seamlessly merge in a segment where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past civilisations to which her instructor answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the classical physics endures beyond her unfortunately cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was infrequently doubted. What was debated, particularly in the beginning, were his doubts about the power of drama: something he frequently talked about in discussions. “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 Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a running commentary on finance, matrimony, morals, class, the fall of the nobility and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a series of works that grapple to great effect with the misuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident falsely declared mad and locked in a cell with an authentic lunatic who imagines himself in control of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the entire orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the cruel absurdities of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a