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Every one of the great dramatists broaden the limits of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their own way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized subjects – from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the mystery of the mind – and turn them into humorous, imaginative and frequently touching plays. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a significant embellisher of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Early Encounter

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard early on. That was completely due to Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a then unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, 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 creativity of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained impeccably polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the ways of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances leading to our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the quiet, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The characteristic blend of intellectual audacity and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a big ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles adhered to an absolute, God-given law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the subject of a speech being prepared 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 failing marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the London Library where he was gripping a pile of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became more and more evident. The turning point arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to revival. It raises a whole host of questions such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of individual madness and whether concepts such as fairness and patriotism exist beyond our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense consciousness of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, works because it is profoundly touching. Ideas and feeling seamlessly merge in a scene where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past civilisations to which her tutor responds: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the Newton's world survives her sadly cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was rarely challenged. What was debated, notably in the early years, were his skepticism about the power of drama: something he frequently discussed 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 avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a ongoing observation on money, marriage, morals, class, the fall of the upper class and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a collection of works that grapple to great effect with the violation of individual freedoms by authoritarian regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident incorrectly diagnosed mad and imprisoned in a chamber with an real psychiatric patient who thinks he is in control of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the full LSO on the stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the brutal absurdities of communist repression with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with irony and inflexibility with a