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Every one of the great playwrights push the limits of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their own fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure themes – from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the enigma of consciousness – and transform them into witty, inventive and frequently moving theatrical works. Drama, Laurence Olivier once said, is a great glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Initial Discovery

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely thanks to Philip French, who, besides being a cinema 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 Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer racked 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 time announcement service. I was impressed by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was perfectly polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the ways of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The characteristic blend of intellectual audacity and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a major philosophical question: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an universal, God-given law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the focus of a speech being prepared 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 fractured marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs 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 time, the feeling of his plays became ever more visible. The breakthrough likely came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to revival. It asks a whole host of queries such as whether any civic duty is the result of private derangement and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense awareness of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is intensely moving. Thoughts and feeling seamlessly coincide in a scene where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past cultures to which her instructor responds: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the classical physics outlasts her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was rarely questioned. What was contested, notably in the beginning, were his reservations about the effectiveness of theatre: something he regularly talked about in interviews. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a running commentary on wealth, marriage, morals, class, the decline of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a collection of works that grapple to great effect with the violation of civil liberties by dictatorial governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident incorrectly diagnosed mad and locked in a room with an authentic lunatic who imagines himself in command of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the cruel illogicalities of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a