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All the finest dramatists broaden the limits of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their unique fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized subjects – from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the puzzle of the mind – and turn them into clever, imaginative and often moving theatrical works. Drama, the actor Olivier remarked, is a significant glamorizer of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Early Discovery

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard early on. That was wholly due to Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to present a mini-speech on two radio plays by a at that time obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer ran up an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed perfectly polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the ways of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was consistently 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 ingenuity 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 random circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the stillness, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive blend of conceptual boldness and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a major moral issue: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether principles followed an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the subject of a talk being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the entrance of the London Library where he was clutching a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became ever more visible. The turning point likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to revival. It asks a whole host of queries such as whether any social obligation is the result of private derangement and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened consciousness of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, works because it is deeply touching. Thoughts and sentiment perfectly merge in a moment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past civilisations to which her tutor replies: “Scientific insights caught sight of and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her tragically cut short life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was rarely questioned. What was contested, especially in the early years, were his reservations about the effectiveness of art: something he often discussed in conversations. “I used to feel alone,” 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 compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a running commentary on money, wedlock, ethics, class, the weakening of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a collection of works that deal to great effect with the abuse of human rights by dictatorial governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly diagnosed crazy and locked in a room with an real psychiatric patient who believes himself in command of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the cruel ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a