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Every one of the great dramatists broaden the boundaries of drama. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their distinct manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric subjects – from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the mystery of awareness – and turn them into humorous, creative and frequently touching theatrical works. Drama, the actor Olivier noted, is a powerful glamoriser of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Initial Encounter

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to give a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a at that time obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer racked up an skyrocketing cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed perfectly gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the ways of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by personality and narrative. 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 commended for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances causing our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the silence, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The typical combination of daring ideas and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a big ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether principles followed an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the subject of a talk being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the anguish of a fractured marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the London Library where he was holding a stack of books that came up 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 increasingly apparent. The key moment arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It asks a multitude of questions such as whether any civic duty is the result of personal instability and whether concepts such as fairness and patriotism exist beyond our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened awareness of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is deeply emotional. Concepts and emotion perfectly coincide in a scene where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, laments the loss of past civilisations to which her teacher responds: “Scientific insights seen briefly and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the classical physics survives her tragically truncated life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was seldom challenged. What was contested, notably in the initial period, were his doubts about the power of theatre: something he often talked about in interviews. “I used to feel out on a limb,” 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 qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a running commentary on finance, marriage, values, class, the decline of the aristocracy and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a collection of works that engage to great effect with the abuse of individual freedoms by oppressive systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly diagnosed mad and confined in a cell with an authentic lunatic who believes himself in charge of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the cruel illogicalities of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a