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All the outstanding dramatists broaden the limits of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their own fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure subjects – from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the mystery of consciousness – and transform them into clever, inventive and often moving theatrical works. Theatre, Laurence Olivier once said, is a great glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Initial Discovery

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard early on. That was entirely due to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he invited me to present a short talk on two radio plays by a then little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer ran up an constantly rising taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed perfectly courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the ways of our world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the silence, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The distinctive blend of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a major philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles obeyed an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the focus of a talk being developed by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs 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 the years, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly visible. The breakthrough arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to reproduction. It poses a multitude of queries such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of private derangement and whether ideas such as justice and national pride exist beyond our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense awareness of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is deeply moving. Concepts and emotion flawlessly merge in a scene where a gifted youth, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past civilisations to which her tutor responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the Newton's world survives her tragically abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was infrequently doubted. What was discussed, notably in the early years, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of drama: something he regularly 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 bad person if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a ongoing observation on wealth, matrimony, ethics, social class, the weakening of the aristocracy and the dominance of business. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a series of works that engage to significant impact with the violation of individual freedoms by oppressive systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident falsely declared crazy and imprisoned in a cell with an authentic psychiatric patient who believes himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the whole LSO on stage and to see Stoppard revealing the harsh illogicalities of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a