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Every one of the great dramatists broaden the boundaries of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their distinct way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure themes – ranging from chaos theory to ethical thought and the puzzle of the mind – and transform them into clever, imaginative and frequently touching plays. The stage, Laurence Olivier noted, is a significant glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Initial Discovery

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly due to Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to give a short talk on two broadcast plays by a then little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer racked up an constantly rising cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed impeccably courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the nature of our world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances leading to our demise. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The typical blend of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a major ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles adhered to an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the focus of a talk being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the London Library where he was clutching a stack of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became ever more apparent. The key moment likely came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to restaging. It asks a multitude of questions such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of individual madness 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 heightened consciousness of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, works because it is deeply moving. Ideas and feeling flawlessly coincide in a segment where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past civilizations to which her tutor responds: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newton's world outlasts her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was seldom challenged. What was contested, especially in the beginning, were his reservations about the power of theatre: something he frequently talked about in interviews. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a ongoing observation on finance, matrimony, morals, class, the decline of the nobility and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a number of works that grapple to significant impact with the misuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist falsely declared insane and locked in a room with an authentic madman who thinks he is in charge of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the full LSO on the stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the cruel ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with irony and strictness with a