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Every one of the great dramatists extend the limits of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their distinct way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure topics – from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the puzzle of awareness – and convert them into clever, inventive and regularly emotional theatrical works. The stage, Laurence Olivier noted, is a great embellisher of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Early Encounter

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely thanks to Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a back then little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer ran up an constantly rising taxi-fare. 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 captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained impeccably polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the workings of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the stillness, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The distinctive fusion of intellectual audacity and emotional substance 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 instilled reaction to history or whether principles obeyed an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the subject of a lecture being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Affecting Breakthrough

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

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became more and more evident. The turning point arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to reproduction. It raises a plethora of queries such as whether any public commitment is the result of private derangement and whether ideas such as justice and patriotism exist independent of our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and free will, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, works because it is profoundly moving. Thoughts and emotion perfectly come together in a segment where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past civilisations to which her teacher answers: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the Newton's world outlasts her sadly cut short life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was seldom questioned. What was contested, especially in the early years, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of theatre: something he often explored in interviews. “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 refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a continuous critique on money, wedlock, morals, status, the decline of the nobility and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a collection of works that grapple to significant impact with the misuse of human rights by authoritarian governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident wrongly declared insane and confined in a room with an genuine lunatic who imagines himself in command of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the entire orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard exposing the harsh illogicalities of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “force is met with wit and strictness with a