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All the great playwrights extend the boundaries of theatre. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their distinct way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure topics – from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the mystery of the mind – and transform them into witty, inventive and frequently emotional dramas. The stage, the actor Olivier remarked, is a powerful embellisher of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Discovery

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard early on. That was wholly thanks to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to present a mini-speech on two radio plays by a at that time obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer ran up an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained impeccably courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the workings of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances leading to 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 resisting the stillness, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The distinctive combination of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a major moral issue: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules followed an universal, God-given law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the topic of a speech being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the London Library where he was holding a mound of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became ever more evident. The key moment perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to revival. It asks a plethora of questions such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of personal instability and whether concepts such as fairness and national pride exist outside our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened awareness of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and choice, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is intensely touching. Concepts and feeling seamlessly come together in a scene where a gifted youth, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past cultures to which her teacher responds: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the Newton's world outlasts her tragically truncated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was seldom questioned. What was discussed, particularly in the initial period, were his doubts about the power of drama: something he regularly explored in conversations. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or 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 feel he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a running commentary on wealth, marriage, ethics, social class, the decline of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a number of works that grapple to powerful results with the abuse of individual freedoms by oppressive governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident incorrectly diagnosed crazy and imprisoned in a chamber with an real madman who imagines himself in command of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the full orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the brutal absurdities of communist repression with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “force is met with irony and inflexibility with a