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All the finest playwrights broaden the limits of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their own fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized subjects – ranging from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the mystery of consciousness – and turn them into humorous, inventive and often emotional theatrical works. Drama, Laurence Olivier once said, is a powerful embellisher of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Initial Discovery

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly due to Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to present a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a at that time unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer accumulated an constantly rising cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met 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 Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained exceptionally courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the ways of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by character and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances leading to our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The typical blend of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a significant ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the subject of a speech being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the London Library where he was clutching a stack of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became more and more apparent. The key moment likely came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It poses a plethora of queries such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of individual madness and whether notions such as justice and patriotism exist beyond our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute realization of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is intensely touching. Thoughts and feeling seamlessly merge in a moment where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past civilizations to which her teacher responds: “Scientific insights glimpsed and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the Newtonian universe survives her unfortunately truncated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was rarely doubted. What was discussed, notably in the beginning, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of art: something he regularly talked about 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 the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The 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, matrimony, morals, social class, the decline of the aristocracy and the dominance of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a collection of works that grapple to great effect with the abuse of civil liberties by oppressive governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident falsely declared insane and locked in a cell with an genuine lunatic who believes himself in control of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the entire orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard revealing the harsh illogicalities of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with wit and strictness with a