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All the finest playwrights broaden the boundaries of drama. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their own fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric topics – ranging from chaos theory to ethical thought and the enigma of the mind – and convert them into clever, imaginative and regularly emotional theatrical works. Theatre, Laurence Olivier once said, is a powerful embellisher of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Early Discovery

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely because of a man named Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he invited me to give a mini-speech on two radio plays by a at that time little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer ran up an skyrocketing cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained impeccably gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the ways of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances leading to our demise. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic fusion of conceptual boldness and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a big ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether principles obeyed an universal, God-given law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the subject of a lecture being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the anguish of a fractured marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was gripping a pile of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly visible. The key moment likely came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to revival. It raises a multitude of questions such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of private derangement and whether concepts such as justice and patriotism exist beyond our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute awareness of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is deeply emotional. Ideas and emotion perfectly merge in a moment where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past civilisations to which her teacher responds: “Scientific insights seen briefly and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe survives her tragically abbreviated life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was seldom doubted. What was contested, especially in the beginning, were his doubts about the power of theatre: something he frequently explored in conversations. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a continuous critique on wealth, matrimony, values, status, the weakening of the upper class and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a collection of works that grapple to significant impact with the abuse of individual freedoms by authoritarian systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident falsely pronounced crazy and locked in a chamber with an authentic madman who thinks he is in charge of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the full orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the brutal absurdities of communist repression with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “force is met with irony and inflexibility with a