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All the outstanding dramatists extend the limits of drama. Beckett and Pinter did it in their distinct fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized subjects – ranging from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the enigma of awareness – and convert them into witty, creative and regularly emotional dramas. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a significant embellisher of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Initial Discovery

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly because of a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to give a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a at that time unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer racked up an constantly rising taxi bill. 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 ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was perfectly courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the workings of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we eventually 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 constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The typical blend of daring ideas and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a significant ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles followed an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the topic of a talk being developed by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the a library in London where he was clutching a stack of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became ever more apparent. The turning point perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to revival. It asks a whole host of issues such as whether any public commitment is the result of personal instability and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense awareness of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and choice, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is profoundly emotional. Concepts and emotion flawlessly come together in a scene where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, laments the demise of past civilisations to which her instructor answers: “Scientific insights seen briefly and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the Newton's world endures beyond her tragically cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was rarely doubted. What was contested, particularly in the beginning, were his reservations about the efficacy of art: something he often talked about in conversations. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a running commentary on money, wedlock, values, status, the fall of the aristocracy and the rise of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a number of works that deal to significant impact with the misuse of individual freedoms by oppressive regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic falsely pronounced crazy and confined in a chamber with an real madman who believes himself in control of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the entire LSO on stage and to see Stoppard revealing the cruel ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with irony and rigidity with a