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All the great playwrights broaden the boundaries of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their distinct fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric themes – from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the puzzle of the mind – and turn them into clever, imaginative and regularly emotional plays. The stage, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a great embellisher of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Initial Encounter

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard early on. That was entirely because of a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a then obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer racked up an skyrocketing cab fare. And in If You’re 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 impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was impeccably courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the nature of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the silence, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The typical fusion of intellectual audacity and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a significant philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions followed an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the topic of a lecture being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was gripping a pile 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 more and more visible. The key moment perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to reproduction. It raises a whole host of issues such as whether any public commitment is the result of personal instability and whether concepts such as fairness and patriotism exist beyond our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and free will, classicism and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, works because it is intensely emotional. Concepts and sentiment seamlessly coincide in a segment where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past civilisations to which her teacher answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the Newton's world endures beyond her unfortunately truncated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was infrequently challenged. What was contested, notably in the beginning, were his reservations about the power of theatre: something he regularly talked about in conversations. “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 social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a continuous critique on wealth, marriage, values, social class, the fall of the upper class and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a number of works that engage to significant impact with the abuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly pronounced insane and locked in a chamber with an authentic madman who imagines himself in command of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the full LSO on the stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the brutal illogicalities of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a