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Every one of the finest dramatists push the limits of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their distinct way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure subjects – from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the enigma of consciousness – and transform them into witty, creative and frequently emotional dramas. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a great embellisher of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Early Encounter

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly due to Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he invited me to present a brief lecture on two radio plays by a back then little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer accumulated an ever escalating cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed exceptionally gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the ways of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances leading to our demise. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic blend of intellectual audacity and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a significant philosophical question: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the topic of a talk being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was holding a mound of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became more and more visible. The breakthrough perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It poses a whole host of issues such as whether any civic duty is the result of private derangement and whether notions such as justice and national pride exist beyond our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened awareness of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and choice, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is intensely emotional. Concepts and emotion seamlessly coincide in a segment where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past cultures to which her tutor responds: “Scientific insights glimpsed and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the Newton's world survives her sadly cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was infrequently doubted. What was discussed, notably in the beginning, were his reservations about the power of art: something he regularly explored in discussions. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a ongoing observation on finance, wedlock, ethics, status, the fall of the upper class and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a series of works that grapple to powerful results with the abuse of individual freedoms by authoritarian governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic falsely pronounced mad and confined in a room with an authentic madman who thinks he is in command of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the brutal ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a