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Every one of the finest dramatists broaden the limits of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their own manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure themes – from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the enigma of consciousness – and transform them into clever, inventive and often moving plays. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a powerful embellisher of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Early Discovery

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard early on. That was wholly due to Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to give a short talk on two radio plays by a back then little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer racked up an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained exceptionally courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the nature of the media.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances resulting in our end. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the stillness, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive fusion of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a major moral issue: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions followed an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the subject of a talk being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Revelation

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

With time, the emotional content of his plays became more and more evident. The key moment arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to restaging. It poses a multitude of queries such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of private derangement and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist outside our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened awareness of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and choice, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, works because it is profoundly emotional. Concepts and emotion perfectly coincide in a moment where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, laments the demise of past civilizations to which her instructor responds: “Scientific insights glimpsed and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the Newton's world outlasts her sadly cut short life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was rarely doubted. What was discussed, especially in the beginning, were his doubts about the effectiveness of drama: something he regularly explored in conversations. “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 compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], 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 continuous critique on wealth, marriage, ethics, status, the decline of the upper class and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a collection of works that engage to significant impact with the abuse of human rights by authoritarian regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic wrongly declared crazy and confined in a room with an authentic lunatic who believes himself in command of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the full orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the brutal absurdities of communist repression with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with wit and rigidity with a