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Every one of the finest dramatists broaden the limits of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their own way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric themes – from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the mystery of consciousness – and turn them into humorous, imaginative and regularly moving plays. The stage, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a powerful glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Discovery

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard early on. That was wholly thanks to Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to give a short talk on two broadcast plays by a then unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer accumulated an skyrocketing cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was impressed by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed exceptionally courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the nature of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The typical blend of daring ideas and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a big philosophical question: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the focus of a lecture being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the a library in London where he was clutching a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became ever more evident. The turning point arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It poses a multitude of issues such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of individual madness and whether notions such as justice and national pride exist independent of our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute consciousness of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is intensely emotional. Concepts and sentiment flawlessly merge in a scene where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past cultures to which her teacher responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the Newton's world survives her sadly abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was seldom questioned. What was contested, particularly in the beginning, were his reservations about the power of art: something he regularly explored in interviews. “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 social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a ongoing observation on money, marriage, ethics, class, the decline of the nobility and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a number of works that grapple to great effect with the abuse of civil liberties by dictatorial systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident incorrectly pronounced mad and locked in a cell with an real psychiatric patient who believes himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the entire orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the cruel absurdities of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a