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All the great dramatists broaden the limits of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their own fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure topics – from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the mystery of awareness – and transform them into witty, creative and often emotional plays. Drama, the actor Olivier remarked, is a powerful glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Early Encounter

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly because of Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to give a short talk on two audio dramas by a back then obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer racked up an ever escalating taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was perfectly gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the ways of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances causing our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic 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 emotional and even tragic.”

The characteristic blend of daring ideas and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a big moral issue: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an unchanging, God-given law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the subject of a talk being developed by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the anguish of a fractured marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the entrance of the London Library where he was holding a stack of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became more and more evident. The breakthrough likely came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to restaging. It asks a plethora of questions such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of private derangement and whether ideas such as fairness and national pride exist beyond our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense consciousness of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, works because it is deeply touching. Concepts and sentiment seamlessly come together in a scene where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, laments the demise of past civilisations to which her instructor responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the classical physics outlasts her tragically truncated life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was infrequently challenged. What was discussed, notably in the early years, were his doubts about the efficacy of art: something he regularly discussed in interviews. “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 Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a ongoing observation on finance, matrimony, ethics, social class, the decline of the upper class and the dominance of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a series of works that deal to significant impact with the misuse of human rights by authoritarian regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic wrongly declared crazy and confined in a room with an authentic lunatic who imagines himself in command of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the brutal illogicalities of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “force is met with irony and inflexibility with a