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Every one of the finest dramatists broaden the limits of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their distinct fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric topics – from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the puzzle of the mind – and transform them into witty, inventive and regularly moving dramas. Theatre, the actor Olivier noted, is a powerful embellisher of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Early Introduction

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely thanks to Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a mini-speech on two radio plays by a at that time little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer racked up an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was exceptionally polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the ways of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the quiet, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The characteristic blend of daring ideas and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a significant philosophical question: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules followed an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the topic of a talk being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was clutching a pile of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became more and more apparent. The key moment arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to revival. It asks a whole host of questions such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of private derangement and whether notions such as justice and national pride exist outside our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute consciousness of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is deeply touching. Concepts and sentiment flawlessly come together in a scene where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past civilisations to which her instructor replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was seldom questioned. What was discussed, particularly in the early years, were his skepticism about the power of drama: something he frequently discussed in discussions. “I used to feel alone,” 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 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 presents a ongoing observation on wealth, matrimony, ethics, class, the fall of the upper class and the rise of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a number of works that grapple to significant impact with the violation of human rights by dictatorial regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic incorrectly pronounced mad and confined in a cell with an genuine psychiatric patient who believes himself in command of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the cruel illogicalities of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a