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All the great playwrights extend the limits of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their unique manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure themes – from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of awareness – and transform them into humorous, imaginative and frequently touching plays. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a powerful glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Early Discovery

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard early on. That was wholly due to Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to present a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a then unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer racked up an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was exceptionally polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the ways of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

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 recognise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances leading to our demise. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the silence, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The distinctive blend of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a major moral issue: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether principles followed an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the subject of a speech being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous 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 complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the London Library where he was holding a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became ever more visible. The breakthrough perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to restaging. It poses a whole host of queries such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of individual madness and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist outside our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute awareness of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and free will, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly moving. Ideas and sentiment perfectly merge in a scene where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past cultures to which her teacher answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her sadly abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was seldom questioned. What was debated, notably in the initial period, were his reservations about the power of art: something he regularly talked about in conversations. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a ongoing observation on money, matrimony, ethics, social class, the fall of the upper class and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a series of works that engage to significant impact with the violation of civil liberties by authoritarian regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic wrongly declared crazy and imprisoned in a chamber with an authentic lunatic who believes himself in control of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the whole LSO on the stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the brutal illogicalities of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with wit and strictness with a