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Every one of the outstanding playwrights push the limits of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their unique fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric subjects – ranging from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the enigma of the mind – and turn them into humorous, inventive and often moving dramas. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a great glamoriser of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Initial Discovery

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly thanks to Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a at that time little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer racked up an ever escalating taxi bill. 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 struck by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was exceptionally polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the workings of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the quiet, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic fusion of daring ideas and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a major ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether principles adhered to an unchanging, God-given law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the subject of a lecture being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a fractured 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 archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. 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 came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With time, the feeling of his plays became more and more evident. The turning point perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to restaging. It asks a plethora of queries such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of personal instability and whether ideas such as justice and national pride exist outside our understanding of them. But underlying 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 deals with fatalism and volition, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, functions because it is deeply emotional. Concepts and emotion perfectly merge in a scene where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, laments the loss of past cultures to which her tutor answers: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the classical physics outlasts her sadly truncated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was seldom challenged. What was contested, especially in the early years, were his doubts about the effectiveness of art: something he often talked about in interviews. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a ongoing observation on wealth, matrimony, ethics, status, the fall of the nobility and the dominance of business. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a collection of works that engage to significant impact with the abuse of human rights by dictatorial systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic incorrectly diagnosed mad and imprisoned in a chamber with an authentic psychiatric patient who believes himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the full LSO on the stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the brutal ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with irony and rigidity with a