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Every one of the finest dramatists broaden the limits of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their unique manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure subjects – ranging from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the enigma of the mind – and convert them into witty, imaginative and often touching plays. The stage, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a powerful embellisher of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Early Discovery

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly thanks to Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a then obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer ran up an ever escalating taxi bill. 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 impressed by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained impeccably courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the workings of our world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances leading to our end. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the quiet, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive blend of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a big philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the topic of a speech being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – 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 researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the London Library where he was gripping a stack of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With time, the feeling of his plays became ever more apparent. The breakthrough arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It asks a whole host of queries such as whether any civic duty is the result of private derangement and whether ideas such as justice and patriotism exist outside our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense realization of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is deeply emotional. Ideas and sentiment flawlessly coincide in a moment where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, laments the loss of past cultures to which her instructor replies: “Scientific insights glimpsed and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the classical physics outlasts her unfortunately cut short life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was infrequently challenged. What was discussed, particularly in the initial period, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of drama: something he frequently talked about in discussions. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a ongoing observation on finance, marriage, values, class, the decline of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a number of works that deal to significant impact with the misuse of civil liberties by dictatorial governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly diagnosed crazy and imprisoned in a room with an genuine psychiatric patient who believes himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the entire LSO on stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the harsh illogicalities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with wit and strictness with a