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All the finest dramatists extend the limits of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their distinct fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure subjects – ranging from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the puzzle of awareness – and turn them into witty, inventive and regularly moving theatrical works. Drama, the actor Olivier remarked, is a powerful glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Initial Discovery

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to give a short talk on two audio dramas by a at that time obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer ran up an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained perfectly courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the workings of our world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances causing our demise. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the silence, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The distinctive blend of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a big moral issue: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether principles obeyed an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the topic of a lecture being prepared 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 dangers of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was holding a mound of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With time, the feeling of his plays became increasingly evident. The key moment perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to revival. It raises a plethora of issues such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of private derangement and whether ideas such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened realization of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is intensely moving. Thoughts and sentiment flawlessly come together in a moment where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, laments the demise of past civilisations to which her teacher responds: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the classical physics outlasts her sadly abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was infrequently questioned. What was debated, especially in the early years, were his doubts about the power of drama: something he often 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 the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a continuous critique on finance, marriage, morals, social class, the weakening of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a number of works that deal to significant impact with the abuse of civil liberties by authoritarian governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist falsely declared crazy and imprisoned in a cell with an genuine psychiatric patient who imagines himself in control of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the whole LSO on stage and to see Stoppard exposing the brutal absurdities of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and strictness with a