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Every one of the outstanding playwrights broaden the limits of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their own way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure subjects – ranging from chaos theory to ethical thought and the mystery of consciousness – and convert them into witty, creative and regularly emotional dramas. Drama, Laurence Olivier noted, is a great glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Early Encounter

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard early on. That was wholly due to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to present a short talk on two audio dramas by a then unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer racked up an constantly rising taxi bill. 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 ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was exceptionally courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the nature of our world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances causing our demise. I remember 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 beating back the stillness, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The characteristic blend of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a major philosophical question: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules followed an universal, God-given law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the topic of a talk being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Revelation

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

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became ever more visible. The key moment perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to reproduction. It asks a whole host of questions such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of personal instability and whether concepts such as justice and national pride exist independent of our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense realization of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and volition, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is intensely touching. Thoughts and feeling perfectly merge in a moment where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past civilisations to which her teacher answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the Newton's world endures beyond her tragically truncated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was infrequently doubted. What was discussed, especially in the initial period, were his doubts about the efficacy of art: something he frequently explored in conversations. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a continuous critique on wealth, marriage, morals, status, the fall of the nobility and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a series of works that engage to great effect with the violation of human rights by dictatorial systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident wrongly declared crazy and confined in a cell with an authentic psychiatric patient who believes himself in charge of an symphony. It was startling both to see the whole orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the cruel ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a