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All the great playwrights broaden the limits of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their unique way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized themes – from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the puzzle of awareness – and transform them into humorous, creative and frequently moving theatrical works. Drama, the actor Olivier once said, is a significant glamoriser of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Early Discovery

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard early on. That was wholly thanks to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to present a mini-speech on two radio plays by a back then obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer accumulated an ever escalating 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 captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was perfectly gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the workings of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances leading to our demise. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the silence, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic blend of daring ideas and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a big ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions followed an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the topic of a speech being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the London Library where he was gripping a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the years, the feeling of his plays became more and more evident. The breakthrough likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It asks a multitude of queries such as whether any public commitment is the result of individual madness and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist beyond our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute awareness of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is deeply moving. Concepts and emotion flawlessly merge in a scene where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past cultures to which her teacher replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe survives her unfortunately cut short life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was seldom doubted. What was discussed, particularly in the beginning, were his reservations about the effectiveness of theatre: something he frequently explored in discussions. “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 Vietnam or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a continuous critique on wealth, wedlock, values, status, the weakening of the nobility and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a collection of works that grapple to great effect with the abuse of human rights by dictatorial governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic falsely declared crazy and locked in a cell with an genuine madman who imagines himself in charge of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard exposing the cruel illogicalities of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “force is met with wit and rigidity with a