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Every one of the finest playwrights broaden the limits of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their own way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric topics – from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the mystery of the mind – and turn them into witty, creative and frequently touching plays. The stage, Laurence Olivier once said, is a great glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Early Discovery

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard early on. That was completely thanks to Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a back then little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer accumulated an ever escalating taxi-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 speaking clock. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed exceptionally gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the workings of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances resulting in our end. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the silence, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The distinctive fusion of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a significant philosophical question: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether principles obeyed an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the subject of a speech being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the a library in London where he was gripping a mound 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 breakthrough likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to revival. It poses a multitude of questions such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of personal instability and whether concepts such as justice and national pride exist independent of our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened realization of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and volition, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, works because it is profoundly emotional. Concepts and sentiment perfectly coincide in a scene where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past civilisations to which her tutor answers: “Scientific insights seen briefly and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the Newton's world survives her tragically truncated life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was rarely questioned. What was discussed, notably in the beginning, were his reservations about the power of drama: something he regularly talked about 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 the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a continuous critique on wealth, matrimony, morals, status, the fall of the nobility and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a series of works that grapple to significant impact with the abuse of civil liberties by dictatorial systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident wrongly pronounced crazy and locked in a room with an authentic madman who thinks he is in control of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the whole LSO on stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the brutal ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with wit and inflexibility with a