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All the outstanding dramatists extend the limits of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their distinct way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric topics – ranging from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the mystery of the mind – and turn them into witty, inventive and frequently emotional dramas. Theatre, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a powerful glamorizer of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Introduction

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was completely thanks to Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to give a mini-speech on two radio plays by a at that time obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer racked up an ever escalating taxi bill. 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 had the chance to meet their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was impeccably polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the nature of our world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the quiet, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The characteristic fusion of daring ideas and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a big moral issue: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles obeyed an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the topic of a lecture being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the a library in London where he was gripping a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became more and more evident. The breakthrough likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to restaging. It raises a plethora of questions such as whether any public commitment is the result of private derangement and whether notions such as justice and national pride exist beyond our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense awareness of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and free will, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, works because it is intensely emotional. Thoughts and emotion seamlessly coincide in a moment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, laments the loss of past civilisations to which her instructor responds: “Scientific insights seen briefly and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the Newtonian universe outlasts her sadly abbreviated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was seldom questioned. What was debated, particularly in the early years, were his reservations about the power of art: something he frequently discussed in discussions. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a continuous critique on money, marriage, values, status, the fall of the aristocracy and the dominance of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a number of works that engage to great effect with the misuse of civil liberties by oppressive regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly declared crazy and locked in a chamber with an genuine psychiatric patient who believes himself in command of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the full LSO on the stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the cruel ridiculousness of communist repression with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with wit and inflexibility with a