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All the finest playwrights extend the limits of drama. Beckett and Pinter did it in their unique way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized topics – from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the mystery of awareness – and turn them into witty, imaginative and frequently moving theatrical works. The stage, the actor Olivier once said, is a powerful glamoriser of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Initial Discovery

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard early on. That was wholly due to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to present a short talk on two audio dramas by a at that time obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer accumulated an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the voice of the time. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was perfectly polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the ways of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral 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 victims of random circumstances causing our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The characteristic fusion of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a big ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the subject of a talk being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the London Library where he was clutching a mound of books that came 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 breakthrough likely came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It poses a plethora of questions such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of personal instability and whether ideas such as justice and patriotism exist outside our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute consciousness of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and free will, classicism and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is intensely moving. Thoughts and feeling flawlessly merge in a moment where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past cultures to which her teacher replies: “Scientific insights caught sight of and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the Newton's world survives her tragically cut short life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was rarely questioned. What was debated, particularly in the beginning, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of theatre: something he often explored in discussions. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a ongoing observation on finance, matrimony, ethics, status, the fall of the upper class and the rise of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a collection of works that deal to significant impact with the abuse of individual freedoms by authoritarian governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic incorrectly declared mad and confined in a room with an authentic lunatic who believes himself in command of an symphony. It was startling both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the cruel ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “force is met with irony and inflexibility with a