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All the finest playwrights extend the limits of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their own manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized topics – ranging from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the enigma of consciousness – and turn them into witty, inventive and regularly emotional plays. Theatre, the actor Olivier once said, is a great embellisher of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Initial Discovery

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard early on. That was wholly thanks to Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to give a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a back then unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer accumulated an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the voice of the time. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained perfectly courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the ways of the media.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate 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 quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the silence, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic combination of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a big ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an universal, God-given law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the focus of a talk 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 anguish of a fractured marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Affecting Revelation

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

With time, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly visible. The breakthrough arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It poses a multitude of questions such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of private derangement and whether concepts such as justice and patriotism exist beyond our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute consciousness of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and volition, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is intensely emotional. Thoughts and sentiment flawlessly come together in a moment where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past civilizations to which her teacher replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the classical physics outlasts her unfortunately truncated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was infrequently doubted. What was debated, notably in the early years, were his doubts about the efficacy of art: something he frequently talked about in interviews. “I used to feel alone,” 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 compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a running commentary on money, matrimony, values, status, the weakening of the aristocracy and the rise of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a number of works that deal to great effect with the misuse of civil liberties by authoritarian governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist falsely pronounced crazy and imprisoned in a chamber with an real lunatic who believes himself in control of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the full LSO on the stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the harsh illogicalities of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a