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Every one of the finest playwrights extend the boundaries of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their unique way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric themes – from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the enigma of awareness – and turn them into witty, imaginative and regularly moving dramas. The stage, Laurence Olivier noted, is a significant embellisher of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Initial Encounter

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was completely thanks to Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a at that time little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer ran up an skyrocketing taxi-fare. 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 is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed perfectly polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the workings of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “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 emotional and even sorrowful.”

The typical blend of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a major moral issue: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the subject of a speech being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Emotional Breakthrough

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

With the passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly evident. The turning point perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to reproduction. It raises a whole host of queries such as whether any social obligation is the result of individual madness and whether concepts such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense awareness of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is intensely moving. Ideas and sentiment flawlessly come together in a moment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past cultures to which her instructor responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the classical physics outlasts her tragically truncated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was seldom doubted. What was debated, particularly in the initial period, were his doubts about the effectiveness of theatre: something he often talked about in discussions. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a ongoing observation on finance, matrimony, values, status, the weakening of the aristocracy and the rise of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a collection of works that grapple to great effect with the misuse of individual freedoms by oppressive governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly pronounced insane and imprisoned in a cell with an genuine lunatic who thinks he is in charge of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the entire orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the harsh ridiculousness of communist repression with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “force is met with wit and inflexibility with a