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Every one of the outstanding dramatists extend the limits of theatre. Beckett and Pinter did it in their unique manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric themes – ranging from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the enigma of consciousness – and transform them into humorous, imaginative and often moving dramas. Drama, Laurence Olivier once said, is a significant embellisher of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Initial Encounter

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly thanks to Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to present a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a then obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer accumulated an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

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

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances causing our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the quiet, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive blend of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a big moral issue: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules followed an universal, God-given law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the focus of a lecture being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was holding a mound of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became ever more evident. The breakthrough arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to restaging. It raises a whole host of questions such as whether any civic duty is the result of private derangement and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened realization of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, functions because it is deeply emotional. Thoughts and feeling perfectly come together in a scene where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past civilizations to which her tutor answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the Newton's world outlasts her sadly truncated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was infrequently doubted. What was debated, notably in the initial period, were his doubts about the power of art: something he often discussed 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 social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a continuous critique on money, matrimony, morals, class, the weakening of the nobility and the rise of business. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a series of works that deal to significant impact with the abuse of individual freedoms by authoritarian governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident incorrectly declared crazy and confined in a chamber with an genuine madman who believes himself in control of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the entire LSO on stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the brutal illogicalities of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a