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Every one of the great dramatists extend the limits of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their unique way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric themes – from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the mystery of awareness – and convert them into witty, creative and regularly moving dramas. The stage, Laurence Olivier once said, is a great glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Early Encounter

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was completely because of a man named Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he requested that I to present a mini-speech on two radio plays by a back then obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer racked up an constantly rising cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was exceptionally courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the nature of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the quiet, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic fusion of intellectual audacity and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a major philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions followed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the focus of a lecture being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was gripping a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became ever more evident. The key moment perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to revival. It raises a plethora of queries such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of individual madness and whether ideas such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense awareness of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and free will, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is intensely touching. Ideas and emotion perfectly come together in a segment where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, laments the loss of past civilisations to which her teacher answers: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her unfortunately cut short life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was seldom questioned. What was debated, especially in the early years, were his doubts about the efficacy of theatre: something he frequently discussed in interviews. “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 the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a continuous critique on finance, matrimony, values, class, the decline of the upper class and the rise of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a number of works that deal to powerful results with the misuse of human rights by dictatorial governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic incorrectly diagnosed insane and locked in a chamber with an real psychiatric patient who imagines himself in charge of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the full LSO on the stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the harsh illogicalities of communist repression with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a