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Every one of the outstanding dramatists extend the boundaries of drama. Beckett and Pinter did it in their distinct way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized themes – from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the mystery of consciousness – and transform them into humorous, creative and frequently emotional dramas. The stage, Laurence Olivier once said, is a great glamoriser of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Early Encounter

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely because of Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to give a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a at that time little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer ran up an constantly rising cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their young author.

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

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances leading to our end. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the stillness, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The typical fusion of intellectual audacity and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a big ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the subject of a speech being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Breakthrough

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

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became ever more visible. The turning point likely came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to revival. It asks a whole host of issues such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of individual madness and whether notions such as justice and patriotism exist independent of our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened awareness of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, works because it is intensely emotional. Ideas and feeling seamlessly come together in a scene where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past civilisations to which her tutor responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the Newton's world survives her tragically abbreviated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was seldom questioned. What was contested, notably in the initial period, were his reservations about the efficacy of art: something he regularly discussed in discussions. “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 Vietnam or 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 feel he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a continuous critique on money, wedlock, values, status, the decline of the nobility and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a series of works that engage to great effect with the abuse of civil liberties by oppressive systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic falsely diagnosed crazy and confined in a room with an authentic psychiatric patient who thinks he is in control of an symphony. It was startling both to see the entire orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard revealing the harsh absurdities of communist repression with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with irony and strictness with a