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Every one of the great dramatists broaden the limits of theatre. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their distinct manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric subjects – ranging from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the mystery of awareness – and convert them into humorous, imaginative and often touching theatrical works. Drama, Laurence Olivier once said, is a powerful glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Early Encounter

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely thanks to Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a mini-speech on two radio plays by a at that time little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer racked up an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained impeccably courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the workings of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the stillness, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive fusion of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a big ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles adhered to an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the focus of a talk being developed by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the a library in London where he was gripping a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly visible. The turning point arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to restaging. It asks a multitude of questions such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of personal instability and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened consciousness of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, works because it is intensely moving. Thoughts and sentiment seamlessly coincide in a scene where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past civilisations to which her teacher responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the classical physics endures beyond her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was seldom questioned. What was debated, especially in the early years, were his skepticism about the efficacy of drama: something he often talked about 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 qualms about that. To avert indirectly 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 the play by Wilde provides a ongoing observation on wealth, marriage, ethics, class, the fall of the nobility and the rise of business. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a series of works that deal to great effect with the abuse of civil liberties by dictatorial regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly pronounced crazy and locked in a room with an real madman who thinks he is in charge of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the entire LSO on the stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the brutal absurdities of communist repression with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and strictness with a