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All the great playwrights extend the limits of drama. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their unique manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric subjects – ranging from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of consciousness – and transform them into witty, creative and regularly emotional dramas. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a great glamoriser of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Encounter

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was completely due to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a brief lecture on two radio plays by a then obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer ran up an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed impeccably polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the workings of our world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we finally 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 cleverness in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances leading to our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the stillness, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The distinctive combination of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a significant moral issue: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an universal, God-given law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the subject of a speech being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating 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 achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was gripping a mound of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the years, the feeling of his plays became increasingly apparent. The key moment arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to revival. It asks a whole host of queries such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of personal instability and whether ideas such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense realization of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and choice, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is deeply moving. Thoughts and feeling seamlessly coincide in a moment where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past civilisations to which her tutor replies: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the classical physics survives her tragically cut short life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was rarely challenged. What was debated, particularly in the initial period, were his reservations about the power of art: something he frequently talked about in interviews. “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 hesitation 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 completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a ongoing observation on money, marriage, values, social class, the weakening of the nobility and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a collection of works that deal to great effect with the violation of human rights by dictatorial governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist falsely declared crazy and locked in a room with an authentic madman who thinks he is in command of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard exposing the brutal absurdities of communist repression with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a