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All the finest playwrights extend the boundaries of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their distinct way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric subjects – from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the mystery of consciousness – and turn them into clever, inventive and often moving theatrical works. Theatre, the actor Olivier remarked, is a powerful glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Early Introduction

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly thanks to Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a mini-speech on two radio plays by a at that time little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer accumulated an constantly rising taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed perfectly polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the ways of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the stillness, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The characteristic combination of daring ideas and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a major philosophical question: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an absolute, God-given law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the subject of a speech being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs 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 replied.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became more and more evident. The breakthrough arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to restaging. It poses a plethora of questions such as whether any social obligation is the result of individual madness and whether concepts such as justice and patriotism exist beyond our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute awareness of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and choice, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is intensely emotional. Thoughts and feeling perfectly coincide in a moment where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past civilisations to which her instructor replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the Newton's world endures beyond her sadly abbreviated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was seldom challenged. What was contested, particularly in the early years, were his doubts about the effectiveness of art: something he often talked about in interviews. “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 the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a ongoing observation on wealth, matrimony, morals, social class, the weakening of the nobility and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a collection of works that grapple to great effect with the violation of human rights by oppressive regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist falsely pronounced crazy and imprisoned in a cell with an real madman who thinks he is in command of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the entire LSO on stage and to see Stoppard revealing the brutal absurdities of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with irony and strictness with a