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Every one of the great dramatists push the limits of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their own manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric topics – from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the puzzle of awareness – and convert them into clever, imaginative and often touching dramas. Drama, the actor Olivier noted, is a powerful embellisher of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Early Encounter

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly thanks to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a mini-speech on two radio plays by a at that time obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer racked up an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained impeccably courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the workings of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by character and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances causing our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the stillness, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive fusion of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a big ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an unchanging, God-given law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the topic of a lecture being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a fractured marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the London Library where he was holding a mound of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With time, the feeling of his plays became increasingly visible. The breakthrough arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to revival. It asks a multitude of questions such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of individual madness and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense awareness of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and free will, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is deeply touching. Ideas and sentiment seamlessly merge in a moment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past civilizations to which her teacher answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the classical physics outlasts her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was rarely doubted. What was contested, notably in the initial period, were his reservations about the efficacy of theatre: something he regularly talked about in discussions. “I used to feel alone,” 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 hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a ongoing observation on money, marriage, morals, class, the fall of the upper class and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a series of works that engage to significant impact with the violation of human rights by oppressive governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly diagnosed insane and locked in a cell with an authentic lunatic who imagines himself in command of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the entire LSO on stage and to see Stoppard exposing the cruel illogicalities of communist repression with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “force is met with wit and strictness with a