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All the finest dramatists broaden the boundaries of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their unique fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure themes – ranging from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the puzzle of the mind – and turn them into clever, inventive and often emotional plays. Theatre, Laurence Olivier noted, is a significant glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Initial Discovery

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard early on. That was entirely because of Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to give a short talk on two broadcast plays by a back then little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer racked up an constantly rising taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact 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 graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was perfectly polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the workings of our world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances causing our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the silence, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive combination of conceptual boldness and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a big moral issue: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules followed an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the focus of a talk being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was clutching a mound of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became ever more visible. The key moment likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It asks a plethora of issues such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of individual madness and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute awareness of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is deeply touching. Thoughts and feeling flawlessly merge in a scene where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past civilisations to which her tutor replies: “Scientific insights caught sight of and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newtonian universe survives her sadly cut short life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was rarely questioned. What was discussed, notably in the early years, were his reservations about the efficacy of drama: something he frequently discussed in discussions. “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 the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a continuous critique on wealth, marriage, ethics, class, the weakening of the nobility and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a collection of works that deal to great effect with the abuse of human rights by oppressive governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist falsely declared insane and confined in a room with an real lunatic who imagines himself in control of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the entire orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the brutal illogicalities of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “force is met with wit and strictness with a