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All the finest playwrights broaden the limits of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their unique fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized topics – from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the enigma of consciousness – and turn them into humorous, imaginative and frequently emotional dramas. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a great glamoriser of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Early Encounter

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely thanks to Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to present a short talk on two radio plays by a then obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer racked up an ever escalating cab fare. And in If You’re 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 cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained perfectly courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the nature of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the silence, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic fusion of daring ideas and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a major moral issue: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether principles adhered to an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the subject of a talk being developed by the play’s protagonist, 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 dangers of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the a library in London where he was holding a mound 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 key moment arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to revival. It raises a plethora of issues such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of personal instability and whether concepts such as justice and patriotism exist beyond our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute consciousness of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is deeply moving. Thoughts and emotion seamlessly come together in a segment where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past civilisations to which her teacher answers: “Scientific insights seen briefly and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the classical physics endures beyond her sadly cut short life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was rarely doubted. What was discussed, particularly in the beginning, were his reservations about the effectiveness of art: something he regularly talked about in interviews. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a ongoing observation on wealth, matrimony, ethics, social class, the fall of the upper class and the ascendancy of trade. 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 regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident wrongly pronounced mad and imprisoned in a room with an genuine psychiatric patient who believes himself in command of an symphony. It was startling both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard revealing the harsh absurdities of communist repression with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with wit and rigidity with a