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Every one of the finest playwrights push the limits of theatre. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their own manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric themes – from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the mystery of the mind – and convert them into witty, creative and frequently emotional plays. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a great glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Early Introduction

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly thanks to Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a mini-speech on two radio plays by a back then little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer racked up an constantly rising taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity 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 today adore – he stayed exceptionally courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the nature of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to understand 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 constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the silence, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic blend of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a significant philosophical question: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an absolute, God-given law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the topic of a speech being prepared 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 failing marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs of the London Library where he was clutching a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became more and more visible. The breakthrough arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to revival. It poses a multitude of issues such as whether any civic duty is the result of individual madness and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist outside our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened realization of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and free will, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is deeply touching. Ideas and emotion flawlessly merge in a scene where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past cultures to which her tutor answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the classical physics endures beyond her tragically cut short life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was infrequently challenged. What was discussed, particularly in the early years, were his reservations about the effectiveness of art: something he regularly discussed in conversations. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a continuous critique on wealth, matrimony, values, social class, the weakening of the aristocracy and the rise of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a series of works that engage to powerful results with the violation of individual freedoms by oppressive governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident falsely pronounced insane and locked in a chamber with an genuine lunatic who thinks he is in command of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the full LSO on stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the brutal ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with wit and strictness with a