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All the finest playwrights push the limits of drama. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their distinct manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric themes – ranging from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of the mind – and turn them into humorous, creative and often touching plays. Theatre, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a powerful glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Early Introduction

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard early on. That was wholly because of Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to give a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a back then obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer racked up an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained perfectly courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the nature of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances causing our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The typical combination of intellectual audacity and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a significant ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules followed an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the subject of a speech being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the London Library where he was gripping a pile of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With time, the emotional content of his plays became ever more apparent. The breakthrough arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to revival. It asks a plethora of issues such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of individual madness and whether ideas such as justice and patriotism exist independent of our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened realization of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and choice, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is deeply touching. Ideas and feeling perfectly merge in a moment where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past cultures to which her teacher responds: “Scientific insights caught sight of and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newton's world endures beyond her tragically abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was seldom questioned. What was debated, particularly in the early years, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of drama: something he often discussed in conversations. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a ongoing observation on money, matrimony, ethics, social class, the fall of the upper class and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a collection of works that grapple to powerful results with the misuse of civil liberties by dictatorial systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident incorrectly declared mad and imprisoned in a chamber with an real madman who imagines himself in command of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the brutal illogicalities of communist repression with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with irony and strictness with a