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Every one of the great playwrights broaden the boundaries of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their unique fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure subjects – from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the enigma of the mind – and transform them into clever, inventive and regularly touching theatrical works. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a great glamoriser of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Initial Discovery

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was completely because of Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to present a mini-speech on two radio plays by a back then little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer racked up an constantly rising taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed perfectly polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the ways of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances causing our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the quiet, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive combination of conceptual boldness and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a significant moral issue: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the focus of a lecture being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about complex 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 stack of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became increasingly evident. The turning point perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to restaging. It poses a whole host of queries 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 perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute consciousness of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is deeply touching. Ideas and emotion seamlessly merge in a scene where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past cultures to which her tutor responds: “Scientific insights seen briefly and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the Newtonian universe survives her sadly cut short life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was seldom questioned. What was discussed, especially in the beginning, were his skepticism about the power of art: something he regularly explored in conversations. “I used to feel alone,” 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 hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a running commentary on wealth, wedlock, ethics, class, the decline of the nobility and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a series of works that deal to great effect with the abuse of civil liberties by dictatorial systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly diagnosed insane and confined in a cell with an genuine psychiatric patient who believes himself in command of an symphony. It was startling both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard exposing the brutal absurdities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “force is met with irony and inflexibility with a