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All the great dramatists extend the limits of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their distinct manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized topics – from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the mystery of consciousness – and turn them into humorous, creative and often touching theatrical works. The stage, the actor Olivier remarked, is a powerful glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Early Discovery

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely thanks to Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to present a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a then obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer racked up an constantly rising taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was impeccably polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the nature of our world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the stillness, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive fusion of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a significant philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions followed an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the topic of a lecture being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the a library in London where he was gripping a stack of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With time, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly apparent. The breakthrough arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to revival. It asks a plethora of issues such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of personal instability and whether ideas such as fairness and national pride exist beyond our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened realization of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and free will, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is deeply touching. Concepts and emotion perfectly come together in a scene where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past cultures to which her teacher responds: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the Newton's world survives her sadly cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was infrequently questioned. What was contested, especially in the initial period, were his reservations about the efficacy of art: something he often explored in conversations. “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], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a continuous critique on wealth, matrimony, morals, class, the decline of the nobility and the dominance of business. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a number of works that deal to significant impact with the misuse of human rights by oppressive governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident incorrectly diagnosed crazy and imprisoned in a cell with an real lunatic who thinks he is in control of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the brutal absurdities of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with wit and inflexibility with a