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Every one of the finest dramatists broaden the limits of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their distinct manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure subjects – from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the mystery of consciousness – and convert them into witty, creative and frequently emotional plays. The stage, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a great embellisher of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Discovery

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely thanks to Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he invited me to give a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a at that time obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer accumulated an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed exceptionally gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the ways of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, 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 acclaimed for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances causing our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the quiet, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive fusion of conceptual boldness and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a major ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles adhered to an unchanging, God-given law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the focus of a lecture being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the London Library where he was clutching a mound of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the years, the feeling of his plays became increasingly visible. The key moment likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to revival. It raises a multitude of queries such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of personal instability and whether concepts such as fairness and national pride exist beyond our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense awareness of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and choice, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, works because it is intensely moving. Ideas and feeling flawlessly merge in a moment where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past civilizations to which her instructor replies: “Scientific insights caught sight of and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the Newton's world outlasts her unfortunately truncated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was rarely challenged. What was discussed, particularly in the initial period, were his doubts about the power of theatre: something he frequently explored in conversations. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a ongoing observation on wealth, matrimony, morals, social class, the weakening of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a series of works that engage to great effect with the violation of individual freedoms by oppressive governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic falsely diagnosed insane and confined in a cell with an genuine madman who imagines himself in control of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the whole orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the harsh illogicalities of communist repression with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with wit and strictness with a