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All the finest dramatists push the limits of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their unique manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure themes – ranging from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the mystery of awareness – and turn them into witty, imaginative and often moving dramas. Drama, the actor Olivier remarked, is a significant embellisher of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Initial Encounter

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly because of a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to give a mini-speech on two radio plays by a back then obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer racked up an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in If You’re 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 creativity of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained exceptionally courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the nature of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive combination of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a significant philosophical question: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules followed an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the topic of a talk being written by the play’s main character, 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 perils of a collapsing society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was clutching a stack of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became ever more evident. The key moment perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to revival. It asks a whole host of issues such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of personal instability and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist beyond our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened realization of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and volition, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, works because it is profoundly touching. Thoughts and feeling flawlessly coincide in a scene where a gifted youth, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past cultures to which her teacher responds: “Scientific insights glimpsed and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the classical physics endures beyond her tragically abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was seldom doubted. What was contested, particularly in the initial period, were his reservations about the effectiveness of drama: something he frequently discussed in interviews. “I used to feel out on a limb,” 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 avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a running commentary on finance, marriage, ethics, social class, the weakening of the nobility and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a number of works that deal to significant impact with the abuse of civil liberties by dictatorial systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident incorrectly diagnosed mad and confined in a chamber with an genuine psychiatric patient who believes himself in control of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the entire orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard exposing the cruel absurdities of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and strictness with a