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Every one of the finest dramatists push the limits of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their distinct fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric themes – ranging from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the enigma of the mind – and convert them into humorous, imaginative and frequently moving plays. Drama, Laurence Olivier once said, is a significant glamoriser of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Early Encounter

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he asked me to present a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a then obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer accumulated an skyrocketing cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed exceptionally courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the ways of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by personality and plot. 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 undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances causing our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the silence, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive fusion of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a big philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether principles followed an absolute, God-given law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the topic of a speech being prepared by the play’s protagonist, 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 dangers of a collapsing society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was clutching a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the years, the feeling of his plays became ever more apparent. The turning point likely came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It asks a plethora of queries such as whether any public commitment is the result of individual madness and whether concepts such as fairness and national pride exist outside our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened realization of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and choice, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is intensely moving. Concepts and feeling flawlessly come together in a moment where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past cultures to which her tutor replies: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the classical physics survives her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was rarely questioned. What was discussed, notably in the beginning, were his reservations about the effectiveness of drama: something he often talked about 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 hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a ongoing observation on finance, matrimony, values, social class, the weakening of the upper class and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a number of works that deal to significant impact with the violation of human rights by oppressive regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident wrongly diagnosed crazy and locked in a chamber with an real lunatic who thinks he is in command of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the full LSO on the stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the brutal absurdities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “force is met with irony and rigidity with a