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Every one of the outstanding dramatists push the limits of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their unique manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure themes – ranging from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the puzzle of the mind – and transform them into clever, imaginative and frequently emotional theatrical works. The stage, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a significant glamorizer of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Early Discovery

I had the good fortune 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 mini-speech on two audio dramas by a back then obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer ran up an ever escalating cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was impeccably polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the ways of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the stillness, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The distinctive blend of conceptual boldness and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a big ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an absolute, God-given law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the topic of a lecture being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was holding a pile of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the years, the feeling of his plays became more and more apparent. The breakthrough perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to revival. It asks a multitude of questions such as whether any public commitment is the result of personal instability and whether notions such as justice and patriotism exist beyond our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute consciousness of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is deeply touching. Thoughts and feeling seamlessly merge in a moment where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past civilizations to which her tutor responds: “Scientific insights seen briefly and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the Newton's world outlasts her sadly truncated life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was infrequently challenged. What was contested, especially in the initial period, were his reservations about the effectiveness of drama: something he regularly explored 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 qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a running commentary on money, marriage, ethics, social class, the fall of the upper class and the rise of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a number of works that grapple to significant impact with the abuse of civil liberties by oppressive regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic falsely diagnosed mad and imprisoned in a chamber with an genuine psychiatric patient who believes himself in charge of an symphony. It was startling both to see the whole orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard exposing the harsh absurdities of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a