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Every one of the great dramatists push the limits of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their unique way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric topics – from chaos theory to ethical thought and the mystery of awareness – and convert them into clever, creative and frequently touching theatrical works. Theatre, the actor Olivier noted, is a significant glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Initial Discovery

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely thanks to Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to give a short talk on two radio plays by a at that time obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer ran up an constantly rising taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained impeccably gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the nature of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances causing our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The typical blend of conceptual boldness and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a major ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether principles adhered to an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the focus of a lecture being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the a library in London where he was gripping a pile of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly visible. The breakthrough arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to restaging. It poses a multitude of queries such as whether any social obligation is the result of personal instability and whether notions such as justice and patriotism exist outside our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute realization of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and volition, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a host of other things, functions because it is deeply moving. Thoughts and emotion seamlessly come together in a scene where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past cultures to which her tutor answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the classical physics endures beyond her tragically truncated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was rarely challenged. What was contested, particularly in the early years, were his reservations about the power of theatre: something he regularly talked about in interviews. “I used to feel alone,” 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 hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a ongoing observation on finance, matrimony, ethics, social class, the fall of the aristocracy and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a series of works that deal to great effect with the misuse of human rights by oppressive systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic falsely pronounced insane and locked in a chamber with an genuine psychiatric patient who thinks he is in control of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the whole LSO on stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the brutal ridiculousness of communist repression with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with wit and rigidity with a