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All the outstanding playwrights extend the boundaries of drama. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their unique fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric themes – from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the mystery of the mind – and turn them into humorous, imaginative and regularly emotional dramas. Drama, the actor Olivier once said, is a significant glamorizer of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Early Encounter

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely because of Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a mini-speech on two radio plays by a at that time little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished 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 time announcement service. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed perfectly gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the ways of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances causing our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the silence, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The distinctive blend of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a significant ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions followed an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the topic of a talk being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the entrance of the London Library where he was gripping a mound of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became more and more apparent. The key moment arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to revival. It raises a multitude of queries such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of individual madness and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist outside our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense realization of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and volition, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, works because it is intensely moving. Ideas and feeling perfectly coincide in a moment where a gifted youth, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past civilizations to which her instructor responds: “Scientific insights seen briefly and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the classical physics endures beyond her sadly abbreviated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was rarely doubted. What was discussed, particularly in the early years, were his reservations about the power of drama: something he often explored in interviews. “I used to feel alone,” 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 avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a running commentary on finance, wedlock, values, status, the fall of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a series of works that deal to significant impact with the misuse of individual freedoms by authoritarian regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident incorrectly pronounced mad and imprisoned in a chamber with an genuine psychiatric patient who imagines himself in command of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the whole orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the harsh absurdities of communist repression with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with wit and rigidity with a