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Every one of the finest playwrights broaden the limits of theatre. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their unique manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric subjects – from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the mystery of the mind – and convert them into witty, inventive and often moving theatrical works. Theatre, Laurence Olivier noted, is a significant embellisher of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Initial Discovery

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard early on. That was wholly due to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to give a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a then obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer racked up an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained exceptionally polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the ways of our world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate 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 quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The distinctive fusion of daring ideas and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a major philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the topic of a speech being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the London Library where he was clutching a stack of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became more and more apparent. The breakthrough likely came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to revival. It raises a whole host of questions such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of personal instability and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and volition, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is deeply touching. Ideas and emotion flawlessly coincide in a moment where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past civilisations to which her tutor replies: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe outlasts her tragically truncated life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was rarely doubted. What was debated, especially in the beginning, were his reservations about the power 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 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 says nothing about anything.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a running commentary on wealth, wedlock, values, status, the decline of the aristocracy and the rise of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a collection of works that grapple to great effect with the abuse of human rights by authoritarian systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic falsely diagnosed crazy and imprisoned in a cell with an genuine psychiatric patient who thinks he is in command of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the cruel illogicalities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “force is met with irony and rigidity with a