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All the finest dramatists push the limits of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their unique manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure topics – from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the enigma of consciousness – and transform them into clever, imaginative and often emotional theatrical works. Drama, Laurence Olivier once said, is a significant glamoriser of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Initial Encounter

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was completely because of a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to present a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a at that time unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer ran up an ever escalating cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed exceptionally courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the nature of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances causing our extinction. I remember 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 quiet, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The typical combination of daring ideas and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a significant ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions followed an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the topic of a lecture being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the London Library where he was holding a mound 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 visible. The key moment likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to reproduction. It poses a multitude of questions such as whether any civic duty is the result of personal instability and whether ideas such as justice and patriotism exist beyond our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense awareness of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and free will, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is profoundly emotional. Thoughts and emotion perfectly coincide in a scene where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past civilisations to which her teacher responds: “Scientific insights glimpsed and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the Newton's world survives her sadly abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was rarely questioned. What was debated, notably in the beginning, were his reservations about the effectiveness of theatre: something he regularly talked about in interviews. “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 allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a running commentary on wealth, marriage, values, status, the fall of the upper class and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a collection of works that engage to great effect with the abuse of human rights by dictatorial governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic incorrectly pronounced insane and confined in a chamber with an authentic madman who thinks he is in control of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the full LSO on stage and to see Stoppard exposing the cruel illogicalities of communist repression with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with wit and rigidity with a