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All the great dramatists extend the limits of drama. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their own fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure subjects – from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the puzzle of awareness – and convert them into witty, imaginative and often emotional plays. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a significant glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Early Encounter

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard early on. That was entirely thanks to Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a mini-speech on two radio plays by a at that time little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer racked up an ever escalating 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 ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed exceptionally courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the nature of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances resulting in 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 word is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The typical blend of daring ideas and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a major ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the topic of a talk being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with playwright 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, encountering him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was gripping a stack of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the feeling of his plays became more and more apparent. The breakthrough arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to reproduction. It raises a whole host of queries such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of individual madness and whether notions such as justice and national pride exist beyond our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute realization of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and choice, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, functions because it is deeply touching. Ideas and sentiment perfectly merge in a segment where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past civilizations to which her teacher answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newton's world survives her unfortunately cut short life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was rarely challenged. What was debated, especially in the initial period, were his reservations about the effectiveness of theatre: something he regularly talked about in interviews. “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 the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a ongoing observation on wealth, marriage, ethics, status, the decline of the nobility and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a series of works that grapple to significant impact with the abuse of human rights by authoritarian regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic falsely diagnosed insane and confined in a cell with an authentic psychiatric patient who imagines himself in command of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the cruel ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a