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All the great dramatists broaden the limits of drama. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their unique fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure themes – ranging from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the enigma of consciousness – and turn them into humorous, imaginative and often emotional theatrical works. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a powerful glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Encounter

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard early on. That was entirely thanks to Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to give a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a back then little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer racked up an ever escalating taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was impeccably polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the workings of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances causing our demise. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the quiet, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The characteristic combination of conceptual boldness and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a major philosophical question: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles adhered to an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the subject of a lecture being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was gripping a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became ever more apparent. The turning point likely came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to restaging. It raises a multitude of queries such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of individual madness and whether ideas such as justice and national pride exist beyond our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened awareness of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and choice, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, works because it is deeply touching. Ideas and emotion seamlessly come together in a scene where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past civilizations to which her tutor answers: “Scientific insights glimpsed and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the classical physics endures beyond her tragically truncated life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was seldom questioned. What was discussed, especially in the initial period, were his reservations about the power of theatre: something he often discussed in conversations. “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 Vietnam or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a running commentary on finance, wedlock, ethics, status, the weakening of the upper class and the dominance of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a collection of works that engage to powerful results with the misuse of individual freedoms by authoritarian regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident falsely declared mad and confined in a room with an real madman who thinks he is in command of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the whole orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the cruel ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a