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All the finest playwrights push the limits of theatre. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their unique manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric subjects – from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the mystery of awareness – and convert them into witty, imaginative and often moving plays. Theatre, the actor Olivier remarked, is a significant glamoriser of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Early Encounter

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard early on. That was entirely thanks to Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to present a brief lecture on two radio plays by a then little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer racked up an ever escalating cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained exceptionally courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the ways of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by character and plot. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the quiet, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic blend of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a big philosophical question: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether principles adhered to an universal, God-given law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the topic of a talk being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was gripping a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With time, the feeling of his plays became ever more evident. The key moment likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to reproduction. It asks a plethora of issues such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of personal instability and whether ideas such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense realization of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, works because it is profoundly touching. Thoughts and emotion seamlessly coincide in a scene where a gifted youth, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past civilisations to which her tutor answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the Newton's world endures beyond her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was seldom challenged. What was debated, especially in the initial period, were his skepticism about the efficacy of drama: something he often talked about 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 qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a continuous critique on wealth, matrimony, ethics, status, the decline of the aristocracy and the rise of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a collection of works that engage to great effect 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 portrayed a Russian dissident incorrectly declared insane and locked in a chamber with an genuine psychiatric patient who imagines himself in command of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the entire orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard revealing the brutal absurdities of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with irony and rigidity with a