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All the great dramatists extend the boundaries of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their unique way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric topics – from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the mystery of consciousness – and turn them into clever, imaginative and often moving plays. Drama, the actor Olivier once said, is a significant glamoriser of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Initial Discovery

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly thanks to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to present a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a then unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer accumulated an constantly rising 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 voice of the time. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained impeccably courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the workings of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The typical combination of conceptual boldness and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a significant moral issue: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions followed an universal, God-given law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the subject of a talk being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the a library in London 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 the years, the feeling of his plays became ever more apparent. The breakthrough arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to reproduction. It poses a multitude of queries such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of personal instability and whether concepts such as fairness and national pride exist beyond our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense awareness of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and volition, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, functions because it is profoundly touching. Concepts and sentiment flawlessly coincide in a segment where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past cultures to which her teacher responds: “Scientific insights caught sight of and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the Newton's world survives her sadly abbreviated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was infrequently questioned. What was discussed, particularly in the early years, were his reservations about the effectiveness of theatre: something he often discussed in discussions. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a continuous critique on finance, marriage, values, social class, the decline of the upper class and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a series of works that grapple to great effect with the misuse of human rights by dictatorial governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident falsely pronounced insane and confined in a chamber with an authentic psychiatric patient who imagines himself in charge of an symphony. It was startling both to see the full LSO on stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the harsh absurdities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a