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Every one of the great dramatists broaden the boundaries of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their own manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric topics – ranging from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the puzzle of awareness – and transform them into clever, inventive and often moving dramas. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a great glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Early Discovery

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard early on. That was completely due to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a back then unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer racked up an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of 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 the journalistic world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two minor 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 definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the silence, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive blend of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a big ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether principles followed an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the topic of a talk being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the London Library where he was holding a stack 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 increasingly evident. The turning point perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to revival. It asks a whole host of issues such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of personal instability and whether notions 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 acute consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, works because it is deeply moving. Ideas and emotion seamlessly come together in a segment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past civilisations to which her teacher replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the Newton's world survives her sadly cut short life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was seldom challenged. What was contested, notably in the initial period, were his doubts about the effectiveness of drama: something he frequently discussed in interviews. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about Vietnam 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 think he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a continuous critique on wealth, wedlock, values, status, the fall of the nobility and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a number of works that grapple to great effect with the misuse of civil liberties by authoritarian regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist falsely declared crazy and imprisoned in a chamber with an authentic madman who believes himself in charge of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the whole orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the brutal ridiculousness of communist repression with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a