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All the great dramatists push the limits of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their distinct fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized topics – ranging from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the mystery of consciousness – and transform them into humorous, creative and regularly touching theatrical works. The stage, the actor Olivier noted, is a significant embellisher of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Early Discovery

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly thanks to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to give a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a then obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer racked up an ever escalating taxi-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 impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit 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 stayed impeccably gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the ways of our world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the quiet, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The distinctive combination of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a major philosophical question: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an absolute, God-given law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the topic of a talk being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the London Library where he was gripping a pile of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became more and more apparent. The key moment perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to revival. It poses a whole host of queries such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of personal instability and whether ideas such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense realization of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and volition, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, functions because it is intensely moving. Concepts and emotion perfectly come together in a moment where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past cultures to which her teacher responds: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the Newton's world outlasts her unfortunately cut short life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was seldom questioned. What was discussed, particularly in the beginning, were his reservations about the power of theatre: something he often talked about in conversations. “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 Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a ongoing observation on money, wedlock, values, class, the weakening of the upper class and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a series of works that engage to significant impact with the abuse of individual freedoms by authoritarian systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident falsely diagnosed mad and locked in a room with an authentic psychiatric patient who thinks he is in control of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the brutal absurdities of communist repression with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “force is met with irony and strictness with a