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All the great dramatists push the limits of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their own way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric subjects – ranging from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the mystery of the mind – and transform them into humorous, inventive and regularly touching dramas. Theatre, Laurence Olivier noted, is a powerful embellisher of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Initial Discovery

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly because of Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to give a mini-speech on two radio plays by a then obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer accumulated an skyrocketing cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed impeccably courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the workings of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances leading to our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive combination of daring ideas and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a significant philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the subject of a talk being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Breakthrough

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

With the years, the feeling of his plays became more and more evident. The breakthrough perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to reproduction. It poses a whole host of queries such as whether any social obligation is the result of personal instability and whether ideas such as fairness and national pride exist beyond our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute consciousness of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and volition, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, works because it is deeply touching. Thoughts and feeling perfectly coincide in a scene where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past cultures to which her instructor answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the Newton's world endures beyond her tragically truncated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was infrequently challenged. What was discussed, especially in the beginning, were his reservations about the efficacy of drama: something he frequently discussed in interviews. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social 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 says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a continuous critique on wealth, wedlock, values, social class, the decline of the upper class and the rise of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a collection of works that deal to great effect with the violation of human rights by authoritarian systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident falsely diagnosed insane and locked in a chamber with an genuine lunatic who believes himself in control of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the entire orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the brutal ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with wit and strictness with a