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All the great dramatists push the limits of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their distinct way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric subjects – ranging from chaos theory to ethical thought and the enigma of consciousness – and convert them into clever, creative and frequently moving plays. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a great glamorizer of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Early Encounter

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely because of Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a short talk on two radio plays by a then unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer accumulated an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed exceptionally polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the workings of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the stillness, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive blend of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a big ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an universal, God-given law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the topic of a speech being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the London Library where he was holding a mound of books that rose 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 more and more evident. The breakthrough perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It asks a multitude of issues such as whether any civic duty is the result of individual madness and whether concepts such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense consciousness of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and choice, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is profoundly touching. Thoughts and feeling seamlessly merge in a scene where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, laments the loss of past cultures to which her instructor replies: “Scientific insights seen briefly and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the Newton's world endures beyond her unfortunately cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was rarely doubted. What was discussed, especially in the initial period, were his skepticism about the efficacy of art: something he regularly discussed in conversations. “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 social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a running commentary on money, wedlock, values, status, the weakening of the upper class and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a number of works that grapple to significant impact with the abuse of civil liberties by oppressive systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly declared insane and locked in a chamber with an genuine lunatic who believes himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the entire orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the harsh absurdities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with wit and rigidity with a