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Every one of the outstanding playwrights extend the boundaries of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their distinct way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized topics – from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the enigma of consciousness – and convert them into witty, inventive and frequently touching dramas. The stage, Laurence Olivier once said, is a great glamorizer of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Early Discovery

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to present a mini-speech on two radio plays by a at that time little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer accumulated an constantly rising taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained exceptionally courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the ways of our world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the quiet, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The typical blend of conceptual boldness and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a significant moral issue: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the topic of a lecture being developed by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the London Library where he was gripping a mound of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became more and more evident. The breakthrough arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to restaging. It poses a whole host of questions such as whether any public commitment is the result of individual madness and whether ideas such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and free will, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, works because it is intensely emotional. Ideas and emotion seamlessly coincide in a moment where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past civilisations to which her teacher responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the Newton's world survives her unfortunately truncated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was seldom doubted. What was debated, especially in the early years, were his doubts about the effectiveness of drama: something he often discussed in interviews. “I used to feel isolated,” 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], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a running commentary on finance, marriage, morals, status, the fall of the nobility and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a number of works that grapple to significant impact with the misuse of individual freedoms by oppressive governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident incorrectly diagnosed mad and locked in a chamber with an authentic madman who believes himself in control of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the harsh ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a