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Every one of the outstanding playwrights broaden the limits of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their distinct fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure subjects – from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the mystery of the mind – and turn them into witty, inventive and frequently touching theatrical works. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a significant glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Initial Encounter

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard early on. That was entirely because of a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a short talk on two audio dramas by a then unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer racked up an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed exceptionally gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the workings of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the silence, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The typical combination of daring ideas and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a major philosophical question: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the topic of a talk being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the London Library 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 emotional content of his plays became increasingly apparent. The turning point arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to reproduction. It raises a plethora of questions such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of individual madness and whether concepts such as justice and patriotism exist outside our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened realization of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, functions because it is deeply moving. Thoughts and emotion seamlessly merge in a moment where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past civilisations to which her instructor responds: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her sadly truncated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was rarely challenged. What was debated, particularly in the early years, were his reservations about the efficacy of art: something he frequently discussed 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 Vietnam or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a ongoing observation on wealth, wedlock, morals, class, the fall of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a series of works that engage to great effect with the misuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident falsely pronounced mad and imprisoned in a chamber with an real psychiatric patient who imagines himself in control of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the harsh illogicalities of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a