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All the great dramatists push the limits of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their unique manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized topics – ranging from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of consciousness – and transform them into clever, inventive and frequently moving plays. Theatre, Laurence Olivier once said, is a great glamorizer of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Discovery

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard early on. That was completely due to Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to give a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a then little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer ran up an constantly rising taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained impeccably gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the nature of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the stillness, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic combination of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a major moral issue: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the subject of a lecture being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was holding a mound of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became more and more evident. The turning point perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to revival. It raises a whole host of questions such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of personal instability and whether notions such as justice and patriotism exist outside our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute awareness of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and volition, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly moving. Thoughts and emotion perfectly coincide in a segment where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past civilizations to which her teacher responds: “Scientific insights seen briefly and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the classical physics survives her unfortunately truncated life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was seldom challenged. What was debated, especially in the initial period, were his reservations about the effectiveness of theatre: something he regularly discussed in discussions. “I used to feel isolated,” 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], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a continuous critique on money, wedlock, ethics, social class, the weakening of the aristocracy and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a collection of works that grapple to great effect with the misuse of individual freedoms by oppressive governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident incorrectly declared mad and imprisoned in a cell with an authentic lunatic who thinks he is in control of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the whole LSO on stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the cruel ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with irony and inflexibility with a