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All the great playwrights push the limits of theatre. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their own fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure topics – ranging from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of the mind – and transform them into clever, inventive and regularly moving plays. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a significant embellisher of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Discovery

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard early on. That was entirely due to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to present a short talk on two radio plays by a at that time little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer accumulated an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was exceptionally courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the workings of our world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic blend of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a major ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the focus of a lecture being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was holding a pile of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With time, the feeling of his plays became increasingly evident. The turning point likely came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to revival. It poses a whole host of queries such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of individual madness and whether concepts such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened awareness of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and volition, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is deeply touching. Ideas and feeling seamlessly merge in a moment where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past civilisations to which her teacher responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the classical physics endures beyond her tragically truncated life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was seldom challenged. What was debated, particularly in the beginning, were his reservations about the power of theatre: something he regularly discussed in discussions. “I used to feel alone,” 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 hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a continuous critique on finance, matrimony, ethics, status, the weakening of the aristocracy and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a collection of works that engage to great effect with the abuse of civil liberties by oppressive regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident falsely diagnosed insane and imprisoned in a cell with an authentic lunatic who thinks he is in control of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the full orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the cruel absurdities of communist repression with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with wit and rigidity with a