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All the great playwrights push the limits of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their distinct way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric themes – from chaos theory to ethical thought and the mystery of the mind – and transform them into witty, creative and regularly moving plays. The stage, the actor Olivier noted, is a significant glamoriser of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Early Encounter

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely due to Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a brief lecture on two radio plays by a back then little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer racked up an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained impeccably courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the workings of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by character and plot. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances causing our end. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the silence, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The distinctive combination of daring ideas and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a big moral issue: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the subject of a talk being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was gripping a mound of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became more and more apparent. The turning point likely came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to revival. It asks a plethora of issues such as whether any social obligation is the result of individual madness and whether concepts such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense awareness of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and volition, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is deeply emotional. Ideas and feeling seamlessly merge in a moment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past civilisations to which her instructor responds: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the classical physics endures beyond her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was infrequently doubted. What was debated, especially in the early years, were his skepticism about the power of art: something he frequently discussed in discussions. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a continuous critique on finance, marriage, ethics, social class, the weakening of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a collection of works that grapple to great effect with the abuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist falsely diagnosed crazy and locked in a room with an authentic psychiatric patient who imagines himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the harsh absurdities of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “force is met with irony and rigidity with a