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All the outstanding dramatists push the limits of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their own manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure themes – from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the enigma of awareness – and transform them into witty, inventive and frequently emotional dramas. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a significant glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Early Encounter

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard early on. That was wholly because of a man named Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to present a short talk on two broadcast plays by a back then obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer accumulated an skyrocketing 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 ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was perfectly courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the workings of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the quiet, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The distinctive combination of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a major philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether principles obeyed an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the subject of a talk being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture 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 viewers were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the entrance of the London Library where he was holding a pile of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly visible. The key moment likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to revival. It asks a multitude of questions such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of individual madness and whether notions such as justice and national pride exist independent of our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened realization of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and volition, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is deeply moving. Thoughts and sentiment seamlessly merge in a moment where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, laments the loss of past cultures to which her instructor responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the classical physics survives her sadly abbreviated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was seldom doubted. What was discussed, especially in the early years, were his doubts about the efficacy of drama: something he frequently explored in discussions. “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 qualms about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a running commentary on wealth, marriage, ethics, social class, the fall of the nobility and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a number of works that engage to great effect with the misuse of individual freedoms by oppressive regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident incorrectly pronounced mad and locked in a cell with an real madman who believes himself in command of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the whole LSO on the stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the harsh absurdities of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with wit and strictness with a