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All the great playwrights broaden the limits of drama. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their own way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure themes – ranging from chaos theory to ethical thought and the enigma of awareness – and transform them into clever, inventive and regularly emotional theatrical works. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a significant embellisher of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Early Encounter

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly thanks to Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he invited me to present a mini-speech on two radio plays by a at that time obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer accumulated an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was perfectly polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the ways of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances causing our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the quiet, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic fusion of intellectual audacity and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a significant philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether principles followed an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the subject of a speech being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was holding a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With time, the feeling of his plays became ever more visible. The turning point likely came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to revival. It asks a plethora of issues such as whether any civic duty is the result of individual madness and whether concepts such as justice and national pride exist independent of our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and volition, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly touching. Ideas and sentiment flawlessly come together in a scene where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, laments the loss of past cultures to which her tutor answers: “Scientific insights seen briefly and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the Newton's world endures beyond her tragically abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was seldom challenged. What was discussed, particularly in the beginning, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of theatre: something he frequently discussed in discussions. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a running commentary on wealth, matrimony, values, class, the weakening of the nobility and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a number of works that deal to powerful results with the abuse of civil liberties by authoritarian regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly declared mad and confined in a room with an authentic madman who thinks he is in command of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the whole LSO on stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the harsh ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and strictness with a