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Every one of the outstanding dramatists broaden the limits of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their distinct way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric subjects – from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the mystery of awareness – and turn them into humorous, inventive and regularly touching theatrical works. The stage, the actor Olivier noted, is a significant glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Early Discovery

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly thanks to Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to give a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a then little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer racked up an constantly rising cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained impeccably polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the workings of our world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances causing our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive combination of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a significant philosophical question: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether principles followed an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the subject of a lecture being written by the play’s main character, 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 dangers of a unraveling society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was gripping a mound of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became increasingly visible. The key moment perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to restaging. It raises a multitude of queries such as whether any social obligation is the result of private derangement and whether concepts such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened realization of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and volition, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, works because it is intensely emotional. Concepts and sentiment seamlessly coincide in a segment where a gifted youth, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past cultures to which her instructor replies: “Scientific insights glimpsed and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newtonian universe outlasts her sadly abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was infrequently doubted. What was discussed, notably in the early years, were his doubts about the effectiveness of drama: something he often discussed 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 the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a continuous critique on money, matrimony, morals, class, the weakening of the upper class and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a number of works that engage to significant impact with the violation of human rights by authoritarian systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic incorrectly diagnosed crazy and confined in a cell with an real madman who believes himself in command of an symphony. It was startling both to see the entire LSO on the stage and to see Stoppard exposing the brutal ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and strictness with a