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Every one of the finest playwrights push the limits of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their own fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure themes – ranging from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the puzzle of the mind – and convert them into clever, creative and frequently moving dramas. The stage, Laurence Olivier noted, is a significant embellisher of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Initial Discovery

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely because of Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to give a mini-speech on two radio plays by a back then obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute 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 voice of the time. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed perfectly courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the ways of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, 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 cleverness in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances leading to our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the silence, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive fusion of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a big moral issue: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions followed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the topic of a talk being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the London Library where he was gripping a pile of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly apparent. The turning point perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to revival. It asks a multitude of questions such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of individual madness and whether notions such as justice and patriotism exist beyond our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened realization of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and volition, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is deeply emotional. Concepts and emotion seamlessly come together in a scene where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past cultures to which her tutor answers: “Scientific insights caught sight of and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the classical physics survives her sadly cut short life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was seldom challenged. What was debated, notably in the initial period, were his doubts about the efficacy of art: something he frequently talked about in conversations. “I used to feel alone,” 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 allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a running commentary on money, wedlock, values, class, the weakening of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a series of works that engage to significant impact with the violation of civil liberties by oppressive systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident incorrectly declared mad and imprisoned in a cell with an genuine psychiatric patient who believes himself in command of an symphony. It was startling both to see the entire LSO on stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the brutal illogicalities of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with irony and rigidity with a