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Every one of the finest dramatists push the boundaries of drama. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their own manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure subjects – from chaos theory to ethical thought and the mystery of the mind – and convert them into witty, inventive and frequently moving plays. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a powerful glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Early Discovery

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely because of Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to present a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a then unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer accumulated an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in If You’re 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 captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained exceptionally gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the nature of our world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we eventually 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 cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the stillness, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The typical fusion of daring ideas and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a major philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the topic of a speech being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Revelation

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

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became ever more evident. The turning point likely came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to reproduction. It poses a whole host of queries such as whether any social obligation is the result of personal instability and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened realization of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is deeply moving. Ideas and emotion flawlessly coincide in a scene where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past civilizations to which her teacher responds: “Scientific insights seen briefly and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the Newton's world endures beyond her unfortunately truncated life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was seldom doubted. What was discussed, particularly in the beginning, were his doubts about the power of drama: something he regularly discussed in interviews. “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 compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a continuous critique on wealth, marriage, ethics, status, the decline of the nobility and the rise of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a collection of works that engage to great effect with the misuse of individual freedoms by oppressive regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident wrongly diagnosed crazy and locked in a room with an real lunatic who imagines himself in control of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the whole orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the brutal absurdities of communist repression with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with wit and inflexibility with a