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All the great dramatists broaden the limits of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their distinct fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure topics – from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the enigma of consciousness – and turn them into clever, imaginative and often moving dramas. Theatre, Laurence Olivier once said, is a powerful embellisher of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Early Encounter

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely thanks to Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to present a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a at that time little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer ran up an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the cleverness 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 first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was impeccably gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the nature of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the stillness, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The typical blend of intellectual audacity and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a major moral issue: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the topic of a talk being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Revelation

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

With time, the feeling of his plays became ever more apparent. The key moment arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to revival. It asks a whole host of issues such as whether any public commitment is the result of private derangement and whether concepts such as justice and national pride exist independent of our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute awareness of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and volition, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is intensely emotional. Concepts and feeling perfectly merge in a moment where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past cultures to which her teacher responds: “Scientific insights glimpsed and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe outlasts her sadly abbreviated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was seldom challenged. What was contested, especially in the early years, were his skepticism about the power of art: something he regularly discussed in conversations. “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 Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a running commentary on money, wedlock, morals, social class, the weakening of the upper class and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a number of works that engage to powerful results with the misuse of individual freedoms by authoritarian systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly diagnosed insane and confined in a cell with an real psychiatric patient who imagines himself in charge of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the brutal illogicalities of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “force is met with wit and strictness with a