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Every one of the great playwrights broaden the limits of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their distinct way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure themes – ranging from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the mystery of the mind – and turn them into humorous, imaginative and frequently emotional plays. Drama, the actor Olivier noted, is a powerful glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Initial Encounter

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard early on. That was completely thanks to Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to present a brief lecture on two radio plays by a at that time obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer racked up an ever escalating cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained exceptionally gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the ways of the media.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances leading to our demise. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the silence, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The typical blend of daring ideas and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a major ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether principles obeyed an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the focus of a speech being developed by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were scrapping 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 receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the London Library where he was holding a stack of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became more and more evident. The breakthrough likely came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to revival. It poses a plethora of queries such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of private derangement and whether concepts such as justice and national pride exist independent of our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense awareness of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and volition, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly emotional. Ideas and sentiment flawlessly come together in a segment where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past cultures to which her instructor replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newton's world survives her tragically truncated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was infrequently doubted. What was debated, particularly in the initial period, were his reservations about the power of drama: something he frequently explored 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 the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a continuous critique on money, wedlock, ethics, social class, the decline of the upper class and the dominance of business. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a number of works that engage to powerful results with the abuse of human rights by oppressive regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident falsely declared insane and imprisoned in a cell with an authentic lunatic who thinks he is in control of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the entire LSO on the stage and to see Stoppard revealing the brutal ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with wit and strictness with a