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All the finest playwrights push the limits of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their own fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure themes – from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the enigma of the mind – and transform them into witty, inventive and often moving dramas. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a significant glamoriser of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Early Introduction

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was completely due to Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a short talk on two broadcast plays by a at that time unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer accumulated an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was impressed by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was exceptionally polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the workings of our world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances causing our end. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the stillness, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The typical blend of daring ideas and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a big ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether principles adhered to an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the topic of a speech being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the London Library where he was clutching a stack of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly evident. The key moment likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to revival. It raises a whole host of issues such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of personal instability and whether notions such as justice and patriotism exist outside our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense consciousness of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and volition, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, works because it is intensely moving. Concepts and sentiment flawlessly merge in a moment where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past civilizations to which her tutor answers: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the Newton's world survives her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was rarely challenged. What was debated, notably in the beginning, were his doubts about the power of art: something he frequently explored in interviews. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a continuous critique on wealth, wedlock, ethics, social class, the fall of the aristocracy and the rise of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a collection of works that grapple to great effect with the abuse of civil liberties 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 falsely diagnosed crazy and confined in a cell with an genuine madman who thinks he is in charge of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the brutal ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with wit and strictness with a