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Every one of the great playwrights extend the boundaries of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their distinct manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric topics – from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the mystery of awareness – and transform them into witty, imaginative and regularly emotional theatrical works. The stage, the actor Olivier remarked, is a powerful embellisher of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Initial Encounter

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely because of Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he asked me to present a brief lecture on two radio plays by a then little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer accumulated an skyrocketing cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive 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 grasped the ways of our world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances causing our end. 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 word is all. The word is pushing back the silence, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The typical combination of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a significant philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles followed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the topic of a lecture being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Emotional Breakthrough

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

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became ever more apparent. The turning point perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to reproduction. It asks a multitude of questions such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of private derangement and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute realization of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, functions because it is deeply touching. Ideas and emotion perfectly coincide in a segment where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, laments the demise of past civilisations to which her teacher answers: “Scientific insights glimpsed and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the Newton's world outlasts her unfortunately cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was infrequently challenged. What was debated, particularly in the early years, were his doubts about the efficacy of drama: something he frequently discussed in discussions. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a running commentary on finance, marriage, ethics, status, the fall of the upper class and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a number of works that deal to great effect with the abuse of civil liberties by dictatorial systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident wrongly pronounced mad and confined in a chamber with an genuine psychiatric patient who thinks he is in control of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the entire LSO on stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the harsh illogicalities of communist repression with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with wit and strictness with a