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All the outstanding playwrights extend the limits of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their distinct manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure themes – from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the mystery of the mind – and turn them into humorous, inventive and frequently moving dramas. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a great glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Early Encounter

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly due to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to give a brief lecture on two radio plays by a at that time little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer ran up an ever escalating cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained exceptionally polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the workings of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we eventually 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 minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the quiet, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic combination of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a major ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules followed an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the focus of a speech being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was clutching a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly apparent. The key moment likely came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to restaging. It asks a multitude of questions such as whether any public commitment is the result of private derangement and whether concepts such as justice and national pride exist beyond our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened awareness of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is deeply moving. Thoughts and sentiment flawlessly come together in a scene where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past cultures to which her instructor replies: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the Newtonian universe survives her unfortunately cut short life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was seldom doubted. What was contested, especially in the beginning, were his reservations about the effectiveness of theatre: something he often 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 Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a continuous critique on finance, marriage, morals, status, the decline of the nobility and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a collection of works that engage to significant impact with the abuse of human rights by dictatorial regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident falsely declared mad and confined in a room with an authentic lunatic who imagines himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the harsh absurdities of communist repression with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with wit and strictness with a