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Every one of the finest dramatists push the limits of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their own fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized topics – from chaos theory to ethical thought and the mystery of awareness – and turn them into clever, imaginative and frequently touching dramas. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a great embellisher of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Initial Discovery

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly because of Philip French, who, besides 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 radio plays by a at that time obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer racked up an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was impeccably gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the workings of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances leading to our extinction. 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 pushing back the quiet, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive combination of daring ideas and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a major moral issue: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles followed an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the focus of a talk being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the London Library where he was holding a stack of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became ever more evident. The turning point arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to revival. It poses a multitude of queries such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of private derangement and whether concepts such as justice and national pride exist beyond our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute realization of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and free will, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is deeply touching. Thoughts and feeling flawlessly coincide in a segment where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past cultures to which her tutor replies: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the classical physics outlasts her unfortunately truncated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was seldom challenged. What was debated, particularly in the early years, were his reservations about the effectiveness of theatre: something he often explored in interviews. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a running commentary on money, matrimony, morals, class, the weakening of the nobility and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a collection of works that engage to great effect with the abuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic falsely declared insane and locked in a cell with an authentic madman who thinks he is in command of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the full orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard revealing the harsh ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a