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Every one of the outstanding playwrights broaden the boundaries of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their own way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric topics – from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the puzzle of consciousness – and turn them into clever, creative and regularly touching theatrical works. Drama, Laurence Olivier once said, is a powerful glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Discovery

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard early on. That was completely thanks to Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a back then obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer ran up an skyrocketing cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was impeccably courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the workings of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances causing our demise. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the silence, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive blend of daring ideas and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a significant ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the subject of a speech being developed by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the anguish of a fractured marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the London Library where he was clutching a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly apparent. The turning point arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to reproduction. It raises a multitude of questions such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of individual madness and whether concepts such as justice and patriotism exist independent of our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense realization of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and volition, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, works because it is deeply moving. Ideas and feeling flawlessly merge in a moment where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past cultures to which her teacher replies: “Scientific insights glimpsed and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the classical physics endures beyond her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was infrequently questioned. What was contested, especially in the initial period, were his skepticism about the power of drama: something he frequently talked about in interviews. “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 refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a running commentary on money, marriage, values, class, the fall of the upper class and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a series of works that engage to powerful results with the violation of civil liberties by dictatorial governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly pronounced crazy and imprisoned in a chamber with an real madman who believes himself in command of an symphony. It was startling both to see the full orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the brutal illogicalities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a