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All the finest playwrights push the limits of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their own way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure topics – ranging from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the puzzle of the mind – and turn them into witty, creative and regularly moving dramas. Theatre, the actor Olivier once said, is a powerful glamoriser of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Encounter

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly because of Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a at that time obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer racked up an ever escalating cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was perfectly gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the workings of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances causing our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the silence, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The typical fusion of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a significant moral issue: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether principles obeyed an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the topic of a speech being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the London Library where he was gripping a mound of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly apparent. The turning point likely came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to revival. It raises a multitude of questions such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of personal instability and whether concepts such as fairness and patriotism exist beyond our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense awareness of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and volition, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly touching. Concepts and sentiment flawlessly merge in a scene where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, laments the loss of past cultures to which her teacher replies: “Scientific insights glimpsed and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe outlasts her sadly cut short life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was infrequently questioned. What was debated, especially in the early years, were his reservations about the efficacy of art: something he regularly discussed in discussions. “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 Vietnam or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a running commentary on wealth, matrimony, morals, social class, the weakening of the upper class and the rise of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a collection of works that grapple to significant impact with the abuse of individual freedoms by authoritarian regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic wrongly pronounced insane and imprisoned in a cell with an genuine psychiatric patient who thinks he is in control of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the cruel ridiculousness of communist repression with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with irony and rigidity with a