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All the great playwrights push the limits of drama. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their unique way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric themes – ranging from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the enigma of awareness – and turn them into clever, inventive and regularly moving theatrical works. The stage, the actor Olivier once said, is a great glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Early Encounter

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard early on. That was completely because of a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to present a short talk on two radio plays by a at that time unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer ran up an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed perfectly courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the workings of our world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the silence, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive combination of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a major philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether principles followed an universal, God-given law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the focus of a talk being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was holding a mound of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly evident. The breakthrough likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It raises a multitude of queries such as whether any civic duty is the result of personal instability and whether notions such as justice and national pride exist beyond our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute awareness of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and volition, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, functions because it is deeply emotional. Concepts and sentiment perfectly coincide in a segment where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past civilizations to which her tutor replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her unfortunately cut short life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was rarely doubted. What was discussed, especially in the beginning, were his doubts about the efficacy of theatre: something he often explored 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 hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a running commentary on wealth, matrimony, morals, social class, the fall of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a series of works that deal to significant impact with the abuse of human rights by authoritarian systems. 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 pronounced crazy and confined in a cell with an authentic lunatic who thinks he is in command of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the whole orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the brutal absurdities of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with irony and rigidity with a