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Every one of the finest dramatists broaden the boundaries of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their distinct way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure topics – from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the enigma of the mind – and turn them into clever, imaginative and often touching dramas. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a powerful glamoriser of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Initial Discovery

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard early on. That was wholly due to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a brief lecture on two radio plays by a at that time little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer accumulated an skyrocketing cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was perfectly polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the ways of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic blend of daring ideas and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a big philosophical question: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an unchanging, God-given law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the topic of a talk 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 suffering of a broken marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was clutching a pile of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became more and more apparent. The turning point arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It raises a whole host of issues such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of private derangement and whether ideas such as justice and patriotism exist outside our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense realization of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is intensely emotional. Thoughts and sentiment perfectly come together in a scene where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past civilizations to which her tutor responds: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the classical physics outlasts her unfortunately truncated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was infrequently challenged. What was contested, notably in the early years, were his doubts about the effectiveness of theatre: something he frequently explored in conversations. “I used to feel isolated,” 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 compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a continuous critique on finance, wedlock, morals, class, the fall of the nobility and the dominance of business. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a collection of works that deal to powerful results with the misuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident wrongly diagnosed mad and locked in a room with an genuine lunatic who believes himself in control of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the entire orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the harsh ridiculousness of communist repression with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with wit and strictness with a