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Every one of the finest playwrights push the limits of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their own way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric subjects – ranging from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the puzzle of awareness – and turn them into witty, creative and frequently moving dramas. The stage, Laurence Olivier noted, is a great glamoriser of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Encounter

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly thanks to Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to give a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a then little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer accumulated an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed perfectly gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the workings of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by character and plot. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word 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 daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a significant philosophical question: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions followed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the topic of a speech being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough 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 complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the London Library where he was gripping a stack 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 ever more evident. The key moment arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to restaging. It poses a plethora of questions such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of personal instability and whether notions such as justice and patriotism exist independent of our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute consciousness of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, works because it is deeply emotional. Ideas and emotion flawlessly coincide in a segment where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, laments the loss of past civilizations to which her instructor replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the Newton's world endures beyond her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was seldom questioned. What was debated, particularly in the initial period, were his doubts about the efficacy of theatre: something he often discussed in discussions. “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 Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a ongoing observation on money, matrimony, values, class, the fall of the nobility and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a collection of works that engage to significant impact with the violation of human rights by oppressive governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist falsely diagnosed crazy and confined in a cell with an real madman who believes himself in control of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the whole LSO on stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the cruel ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a