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Every one of the outstanding dramatists extend the limits of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their unique manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure subjects – from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the mystery of awareness – and transform them into humorous, imaginative and frequently emotional plays. Theatre, the actor Olivier remarked, is a significant glamoriser of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Initial Encounter

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely because of a man named Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to present a short talk on two audio dramas by a then unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer accumulated an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed exceptionally polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the workings of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its brilliance 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 arbitrary circumstances causing our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the quiet, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic combination of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a major moral issue: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether principles obeyed an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the topic of a speech being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the a library in London where he was clutching a mound of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With time, the feeling of his plays became more and more evident. The breakthrough arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It raises a multitude of queries such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of individual madness and whether notions such as justice and national pride exist beyond our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened realization of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and volition, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, works because it is deeply emotional. Ideas and sentiment flawlessly coincide in a scene where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past civilisations to which her tutor answers: “Scientific insights caught sight of and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the classical physics outlasts her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was seldom challenged. What was contested, notably in the initial period, were his reservations about the efficacy of theatre: something he regularly discussed in discussions. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a ongoing observation on wealth, marriage, ethics, social class, the fall of the aristocracy and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a number of works that engage to great effect with the misuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic incorrectly declared mad and confined in a chamber with an real lunatic who imagines himself in command of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the full LSO on the stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the cruel ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “force is met with irony and rigidity with a