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Every one of the finest dramatists broaden the limits of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their distinct way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric topics – from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the mystery of the mind – and turn them into humorous, creative and often touching plays. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a great glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Discovery

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to give a short talk on two audio dramas by a back then little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer ran up an ever escalating cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed exceptionally polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the ways of our world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances resulting in our end. 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 word is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The typical fusion of daring ideas and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a major ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether principles adhered to an universal, God-given law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the topic of a speech being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the London Library where he was clutching a stack of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became more and more apparent. The turning point perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to restaging. It asks a plethora of queries such as whether any civic duty is the result of private derangement and whether ideas such as justice and national pride exist beyond our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense consciousness of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and volition, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is intensely touching. Concepts and emotion flawlessly come together in a moment where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past civilisations to which her instructor responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the Newton's world survives her sadly abbreviated life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was seldom challenged. What was discussed, notably in the initial period, were his reservations about the efficacy of art: something he often explored in interviews. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no compunction 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 Oscar Wilde's work presents a ongoing observation on wealth, wedlock, values, social class, the decline of the nobility and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a series of works that grapple to great effect with the misuse of human rights by dictatorial systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident wrongly pronounced insane and locked in a cell with an real lunatic who imagines himself in charge of an symphony. It was startling both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the harsh ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a