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All the great dramatists broaden the limits of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their unique manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric topics – ranging from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the puzzle of consciousness – and transform them into clever, imaginative and regularly touching dramas. Theatre, the actor Olivier noted, is a great glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Initial Discovery

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard early on. That was completely thanks to Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a short talk on two audio dramas by a at that time little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer accumulated an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained impeccably polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the nature of our world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by character and plot. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the silence, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic combination of conceptual boldness and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a significant moral issue: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the topic of a talk being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was clutching a mound of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the feeling of his plays became increasingly visible. The key moment likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to restaging. It asks a whole host of questions such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of individual madness and whether ideas such as justice and national pride exist independent of our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute consciousness of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, functions because it is profoundly touching. Thoughts and feeling flawlessly come together in a segment where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past civilisations to which her tutor responds: “Scientific insights caught sight of and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the Newton's world endures beyond her unfortunately cut short life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was seldom doubted. What was contested, particularly in the early years, were his reservations about the efficacy of theatre: something he regularly talked about in discussions. “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 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 avoids serious topics.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a continuous critique on money, matrimony, ethics, social class, the fall of the nobility and the rise of business. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a series of works that engage to great effect with the misuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly pronounced insane and confined in a chamber with an genuine madman who imagines himself in charge of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the entire orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the harsh illogicalities of communist repression with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “force is met with irony and inflexibility with a