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All the finest playwrights push the limits of drama. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their unique way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric topics – ranging from chaos theory to ethical thought and the mystery of consciousness – and turn them into witty, creative and regularly emotional plays. Theatre, the actor Olivier once said, is a powerful glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Initial Encounter

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard early on. That was entirely because of a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to present a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a back then little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished 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 creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was perfectly courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the workings of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances causing our end. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the silence, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The typical blend of conceptual boldness and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a big moral issue: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the topic of a speech being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was gripping a mound of books that reached 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 turning point likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to revival. It poses a multitude of questions such as whether any public commitment is the result of individual madness and whether concepts such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is intensely moving. Thoughts and sentiment flawlessly coincide in a scene where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past civilizations to which her instructor responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her tragically abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was seldom questioned. What was discussed, especially in the initial period, were his reservations about the effectiveness of drama: something he regularly 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 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 avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a ongoing observation on money, marriage, ethics, social class, the fall of the nobility and the rise of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a number of works that grapple to powerful results with the abuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident wrongly diagnosed insane and confined in a chamber with an genuine lunatic who believes himself in charge of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the full orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the cruel absurdities of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “force is met with irony and inflexibility with a