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Every one of the great dramatists broaden the limits of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their own manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure topics – from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the puzzle of the mind – and transform them into witty, imaginative and frequently touching dramas. Drama, Laurence Olivier once said, is a significant embellisher of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Discovery

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard early on. That was wholly due to Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to give a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a at that time unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer accumulated an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was impressed by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained perfectly gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the ways of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The typical combination of daring ideas and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a significant ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an absolute, God-given law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the focus of a lecture being developed by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Emotional Breakthrough

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

With time, the sentiment of his plays became more and more apparent. The breakthrough arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It asks a whole host of questions such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of private derangement and whether ideas such as justice and national pride exist outside our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense consciousness of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and free will, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, works because it is profoundly emotional. Ideas and emotion perfectly coincide in a scene where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past civilisations to which her teacher replies: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the classical physics survives her tragically abbreviated life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was seldom doubted. What was discussed, particularly in the early years, were his doubts about the efficacy of theatre: something he often explored in discussions. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a ongoing observation on wealth, matrimony, morals, social class, the fall of the nobility and the rise of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a series of works that engage to significant impact with the misuse of human rights by authoritarian governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic falsely pronounced mad and locked in a chamber with an real madman who imagines himself in command of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the full LSO on the stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the brutal illogicalities of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “force is met with wit and rigidity with a