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All the finest playwrights push the limits of theatre. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their unique manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure subjects – ranging from chaos theory to ethical thought and the mystery of the mind – and turn them into clever, inventive and frequently emotional dramas. Drama, Laurence Olivier noted, is a significant glamoriser of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Introduction

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard early on. That was entirely because of a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to present a short talk on two broadcast plays by a then obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer racked up an skyrocketing cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with 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 grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained perfectly polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the ways of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the silence, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The characteristic fusion of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a major ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the subject of a lecture being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Breakthrough

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 investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the London Library where he was holding a stack of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly visible. The key moment arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to restaging. It poses a plethora of questions such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of private derangement and whether concepts such as justice and national pride exist beyond our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense awareness of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and volition, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is profoundly moving. Thoughts and emotion perfectly come together in a moment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, laments the demise of past cultures to which her teacher replies: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the Newton's world outlasts her tragically cut short life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was rarely questioned. What was discussed, particularly in the early years, were his reservations about the efficacy of drama: something he often talked about in conversations. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a ongoing observation on finance, matrimony, values, social class, the decline of the upper class and the rise of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a number of works that deal to significant impact with the abuse of civil liberties by authoritarian systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident incorrectly diagnosed insane and locked in a chamber with an real psychiatric patient who thinks he is in command of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the full orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard exposing the harsh ridiculousness of communist repression with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with wit and rigidity with a