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Every one of the outstanding playwrights extend the limits of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their own manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized topics – from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the enigma of consciousness – and turn them into humorous, imaginative and often touching plays. The stage, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a powerful glamoriser of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Early Encounter

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly due to Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a short talk on two broadcast plays by a at that time unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer ran up an ever escalating taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was perfectly courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the nature of our world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we finally 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 constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the quiet, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The typical fusion of daring ideas and heartfelt depth 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 learned behavior to history or whether principles obeyed an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the subject of a talk being developed 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 anguish of a broken marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs of the London Library where he was gripping a pile of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became ever more visible. The breakthrough perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to restaging. It poses a whole host of issues such as whether any public commitment is the result of personal instability and whether ideas such as justice and patriotism exist independent of our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense consciousness of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and volition, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is deeply touching. Thoughts and feeling flawlessly merge in a scene where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past cultures to which her teacher responds: “Scientific insights caught sight of and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the classical physics survives her tragically abbreviated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was infrequently questioned. What was discussed, notably in the initial period, were his doubts about the efficacy of drama: something he frequently explored in conversations. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a running commentary on finance, matrimony, values, status, the fall of the aristocracy and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a number of works that engage to great effect with the abuse of civil liberties by dictatorial governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic incorrectly declared crazy and locked in a room with an real madman who believes himself in control of an symphony. It was startling both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the harsh ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with wit and strictness with a