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Every one of the outstanding dramatists broaden the boundaries of theatre. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their distinct manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized themes – from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the enigma of awareness – and turn them into witty, inventive and often touching dramas. Drama, Laurence Olivier noted, is a powerful embellisher of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Early Introduction

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard early on. That was entirely due to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a then obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer ran up an constantly rising taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator 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 emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained impeccably gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the ways of our world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances resulting in our end. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the quiet, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The typical blend of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a major ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether principles followed an absolute, God-given law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the focus of a lecture being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Breakthrough

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

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became ever more evident. The turning point likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to reproduction. It asks a whole host of queries such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of personal instability and whether ideas such as justice and national pride exist independent of our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and volition, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is deeply touching. Ideas and feeling flawlessly merge in a moment where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past civilisations to which her tutor replies: “Scientific insights glimpsed and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the Newton's world survives her unfortunately truncated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was infrequently doubted. What was discussed, notably in the initial period, were his reservations about the power of drama: something he frequently discussed in discussions. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a ongoing observation on finance, marriage, values, social class, the fall of the nobility and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a number of works that engage to significant impact with the misuse of civil liberties by dictatorial regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident incorrectly declared mad and locked in a chamber with an authentic lunatic who thinks he is in charge of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the whole LSO on stage and to see Stoppard revealing the cruel ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a