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All the great dramatists broaden the limits of theatre. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their unique fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric subjects – from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the mystery of consciousness – and transform them into witty, creative and often moving plays. Theatre, the actor Olivier noted, is a powerful glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Early Encounter

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely because of a man named Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to give a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a at that time unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer ran up an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was impeccably polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the nature of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances causing 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 language is all. The word is pushing back the silence, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The typical fusion of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a big ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles adhered to an universal, God-given law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the subject of a lecture being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped 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 Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

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

With time, the feeling of his plays became increasingly apparent. The key moment likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to restaging. It poses a plethora of issues such as whether any public commitment is the result of personal instability and whether ideas such as justice and patriotism exist beyond our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense awareness of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and free will, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, works because it is profoundly emotional. Concepts and emotion seamlessly come together in a moment where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past civilisations to which her teacher responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the classical physics survives her unfortunately truncated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was rarely challenged. What was discussed, especially in the beginning, were his doubts about the effectiveness of theatre: something he regularly explored in discussions. “I used to feel out on a limb,” 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 allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a continuous critique on money, wedlock, values, social class, the fall of the nobility and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a series of works that deal to significant impact with the misuse of individual freedoms by authoritarian governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident wrongly pronounced crazy and confined in a chamber with an real lunatic who imagines himself in charge of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the entire LSO on stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the harsh absurdities of communist repression with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with wit and strictness with a