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Every one of the finest dramatists push the limits of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their distinct fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure subjects – ranging from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the enigma of the mind – and convert them into humorous, imaginative and frequently emotional theatrical works. Theatre, Laurence Olivier once said, is a powerful embellisher of ideas. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Early Introduction

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard early on. That was completely because of a man named Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to give a short talk on two broadcast plays by a then unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer ran 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 struck by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was impeccably polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the nature of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our end. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The typical fusion of daring ideas and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a significant philosophical question: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether principles obeyed an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the topic of a speech being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the London Library where he was holding a mound of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly visible. The key moment likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to restaging. It asks a multitude of queries such as whether any social obligation is the result of individual madness and whether ideas such as fairness and national pride exist beyond our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened awareness of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and choice, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is profoundly emotional. Concepts and sentiment flawlessly coincide in a moment where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past civilizations to which her tutor answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newton's world outlasts her tragically abbreviated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was infrequently challenged. What was debated, notably in the early years, were his reservations about the power of art: something he regularly explored in interviews. “I used to feel isolated,” 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 social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a ongoing observation on money, matrimony, values, class, the weakening of the nobility and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a collection of works that deal to great effect with the abuse of civil liberties by dictatorial systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic incorrectly declared mad and confined in a cell with an real lunatic who thinks he is in command of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the whole LSO on the stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the cruel illogicalities of communist repression with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with irony and inflexibility with a