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All the outstanding playwrights broaden the boundaries of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their own way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric themes – ranging from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the enigma of awareness – and turn them into witty, inventive and regularly emotional theatrical works. Theatre, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a significant embellisher of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Initial Encounter

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly because of Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to give a short talk on two radio plays by a back then unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer ran up an ever escalating cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained perfectly gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the workings of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember the actor 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 pushing back the stillness, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The typical combination of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a major moral issue: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions followed an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the focus of a talk being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a ex- 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 viewers were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting 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 answered.

With time, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly evident. The breakthrough arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to reproduction. It poses a whole host of queries such as whether any civic duty is the result of individual madness and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense awareness of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and free will, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is deeply emotional. Ideas and feeling seamlessly merge in a moment where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past cultures to which her tutor responds: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the Newtonian universe outlasts her tragically cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was seldom questioned. What was discussed, particularly in the early years, were his reservations about the efficacy of theatre: something he regularly discussed in discussions. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a running commentary on finance, marriage, ethics, social class, the weakening of the aristocracy and the rise of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a collection of works that engage to powerful results with the violation of human rights by dictatorial systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist falsely pronounced mad and locked in a room with an genuine lunatic who believes himself in command of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the harsh illogicalities of communist repression with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and strictness with a