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Every one of the finest dramatists extend the limits of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their own fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized subjects – ranging from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of awareness – and turn them into clever, inventive and regularly emotional plays. Theatre, the actor Olivier noted, is a significant glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Initial Encounter

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely thanks to Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to give a short talk on two broadcast plays by a then obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer racked up an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was exceptionally polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the ways of our world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances leading to our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the quiet, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The distinctive fusion of daring ideas and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a big moral issue: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the subject of a speech being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the London Library where he was holding a pile of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became more and more apparent. The key moment arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It poses a multitude of issues such as whether any social obligation is the result of individual madness and whether ideas such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute consciousness of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, works because it is deeply emotional. Thoughts and sentiment perfectly come together in a scene where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past cultures to which her teacher answers: “Scientific insights seen briefly and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newton's world survives her tragically cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was rarely questioned. What was discussed, particularly in the initial period, were his reservations about the efficacy of theatre: something he regularly talked about in conversations. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person 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 significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a running commentary on money, matrimony, values, class, the fall of the nobility and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a collection of works that grapple to great effect with the misuse of civil liberties by authoritarian regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident wrongly pronounced insane and imprisoned in a cell with an genuine madman who thinks he is in control of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the cruel absurdities of communist repression with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “force is met with irony and inflexibility with a