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Every one of the outstanding dramatists push the limits of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their distinct manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric themes – ranging from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the enigma of consciousness – and convert them into witty, creative and often emotional plays. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a powerful glamoriser of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Early Introduction

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard early on. That was entirely due to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to give a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a at that time little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer ran up an ever escalating cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed exceptionally gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the nature of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual 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 reveal that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances causing our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the quiet, pushing back the darkness … 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 moral issue: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an unchanging, God-given law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the subject of a talk being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was gripping a stack of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With time, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly evident. The key moment likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It raises a whole host of issues such as whether any civic duty is the result of private derangement and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist beyond our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened consciousness of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and volition, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, functions because it is profoundly emotional. Concepts and feeling seamlessly coincide in a scene where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past civilisations to which her tutor answers: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the classical physics endures beyond her tragically truncated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was seldom questioned. What was debated, particularly in the initial period, were his reservations about the efficacy of theatre: something he frequently talked about in interviews. “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 social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a ongoing observation on wealth, wedlock, morals, status, the fall of the aristocracy and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a series of works that grapple to significant impact with the abuse of individual freedoms by oppressive systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic falsely diagnosed crazy and imprisoned in a chamber with an authentic lunatic who believes himself in control of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the cruel illogicalities of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “force is met with wit and inflexibility with a