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All the outstanding playwrights extend the limits of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their own fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure themes – ranging from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the puzzle of awareness – and convert them into clever, imaginative and regularly moving plays. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a powerful glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Early Introduction

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly thanks to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to present a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a at that time little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer ran up 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 struck by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed exceptionally courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the ways of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the stillness, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The distinctive combination of daring ideas and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a major moral issue: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions followed an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the topic of a lecture 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 pain of a failing marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the London Library where he was clutching a stack of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With time, the feeling of his plays became more and more apparent. The turning point perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to revival. It raises a plethora of questions such as whether any civic duty is the result of personal instability and whether concepts such as justice and patriotism exist beyond our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened awareness of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, works because it is intensely emotional. Thoughts and sentiment flawlessly coincide in a scene where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past civilisations to which her teacher replies: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the Newton's world outlasts her unfortunately truncated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was rarely challenged. What was contested, particularly in the initial period, were his doubts about the efficacy of theatre: something he frequently explored in interviews. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a continuous critique on money, wedlock, values, status, the weakening of the upper class and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a collection of works that engage to great effect with the abuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist falsely diagnosed mad and locked in a room with an real lunatic who imagines himself in command of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the brutal illogicalities of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a