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All the finest dramatists push the limits of drama. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their own fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric subjects – from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the puzzle of awareness – and transform them into humorous, inventive and often emotional plays. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a significant glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

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 movie reviewer, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a at that time unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer racked up an ever escalating taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was perfectly gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the nature of our world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the quiet, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The characteristic blend of intellectual audacity and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a major moral issue: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the subject of a talk being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the London Library where he was gripping a stack of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became more and more visible. The key moment arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to restaging. It raises a multitude of issues such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of individual madness and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened awareness of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and free will, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly emotional. Concepts and sentiment perfectly merge in a segment where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past cultures to which her tutor answers: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the Newton's world survives her sadly truncated life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was seldom questioned. What was discussed, especially in the beginning, were his reservations about the power of art: something he regularly talked about in interviews. “I used to feel alone,” 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 housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The 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 ongoing observation on money, wedlock, values, social class, the decline of the nobility and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a collection of works that deal to significant impact with the misuse 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 portrayed a Soviet critic incorrectly pronounced mad and confined in a room with an genuine psychiatric patient who imagines himself in command of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the full orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the cruel absurdities of communist repression with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with wit and strictness with a