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Every one of the finest dramatists push the limits of theatre. Beckett and Pinter did it in their unique fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric subjects – ranging from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the enigma of the mind – and transform them into humorous, inventive and frequently moving dramas. Drama, the actor Olivier once said, is a significant glamoriser of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Discovery

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly thanks to Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to present a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a at that time obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer racked up an ever escalating cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed exceptionally gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the nature of our world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all victims 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 word is all. The word is resisting the stillness, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The distinctive blend of intellectual audacity and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a significant philosophical question: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the focus of a talk being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research 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 thoroughly investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the London Library where he was clutching a mound of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became more and more evident. The breakthrough likely came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to restaging. It asks a whole host of questions such as whether any social obligation is the result of private derangement and whether ideas such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense realization of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and choice, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a host of other things, works because it is deeply emotional. Thoughts and feeling perfectly merge in a moment where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past civilisations to which her instructor answers: “Scientific insights seen briefly and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the Newton's world survives her tragically abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was seldom challenged. What was debated, especially in the initial period, were his reservations about the effectiveness of art: something he regularly explored in conversations. “I used to feel isolated,” 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 compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a running commentary on finance, matrimony, ethics, class, the fall of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a number of works that deal to powerful results with the abuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident incorrectly declared mad and confined in a room with an genuine madman who believes himself in command of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the whole LSO on stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the harsh absurdities of communist repression with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with irony and inflexibility with a