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Every one of the outstanding dramatists broaden the boundaries of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their unique manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric topics – ranging from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the mystery of awareness – and convert them into clever, inventive and often touching dramas. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a significant embellisher of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Early Encounter

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely due to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to present a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a at that time unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer accumulated an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their young author.

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

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the silence, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The typical fusion of intellectual audacity and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a major ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles obeyed an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the topic of a talk being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a fractured marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Revelation

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

With time, the sentiment of his plays became ever more evident. The key moment arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to revival. It poses a multitude of questions such as whether any public commitment is the result of individual madness and whether notions such as justice and patriotism exist independent of our perceptions of them. But beneath 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 determinism and volition, classicism and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is deeply emotional. Thoughts and feeling flawlessly coincide in a moment where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past cultures to which her instructor answers: “Scientific insights seen briefly and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the classical physics outlasts her unfortunately cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was infrequently questioned. What was discussed, notably in the beginning, were his doubts about the effectiveness of theatre: something he frequently 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 shit if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a ongoing observation on money, wedlock, ethics, class, the fall of the aristocracy and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a series of works that engage to great effect with the misuse of civil liberties by oppressive regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident falsely diagnosed mad and confined in a cell with an genuine psychiatric patient who imagines himself in charge of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the full orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the cruel ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with irony and inflexibility with a