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All the finest playwrights push the limits of theatre. Beckett and Pinter did it in their distinct fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric themes – from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of the mind – and transform them into witty, inventive and regularly emotional theatrical works. The stage, the actor Olivier remarked, is a powerful embellisher of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Initial Encounter

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely thanks to Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to give a short talk on two broadcast plays by a at that time little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer accumulated an constantly rising taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained impeccably courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the nature of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by character and plot. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary 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 language is all. The word is resisting the quiet, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The characteristic blend of conceptual boldness and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a significant moral issue: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an universal, God-given law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the focus of a talk being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the a library in London where he was clutching a mound of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly apparent. The breakthrough arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to restaging. It asks a plethora of questions such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of individual madness and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense awareness of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and volition, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, works because it is intensely moving. Concepts and sentiment seamlessly coincide in a moment where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past civilizations to which her tutor responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the Newton's world endures beyond her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was seldom challenged. What was discussed, notably in the early years, were his doubts about the effectiveness of drama: something he regularly explored in conversations. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a continuous critique on finance, wedlock, ethics, social class, the decline of the upper class and the rise of business. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a number of works that engage to powerful results with the misuse of civil liberties by oppressive systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident incorrectly pronounced crazy and imprisoned in a cell with an authentic lunatic who thinks he is in command of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the whole LSO on the stage and to see Stoppard revealing the cruel ridiculousness of communist repression with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “force is met with wit and strictness with a