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All the finest playwrights push the boundaries of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their unique fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric themes – from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the mystery of consciousness – and turn them into witty, creative and often moving theatrical works. Theatre, Laurence Olivier once said, is a significant embellisher of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Early Discovery

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely due to Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to give a mini-speech on two radio plays by a at that time obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer racked up an constantly rising taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was impeccably polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the nature of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances leading to our end. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the silence, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive blend of intellectual audacity and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a major philosophical question: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the topic of a talk being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the London Library where he was gripping a mound 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 key moment perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to restaging. It raises a plethora of issues such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of individual madness and whether ideas such as fairness and national pride exist outside our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute awareness of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and choice, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is intensely emotional. Concepts and sentiment flawlessly merge in a segment where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past cultures to which her instructor replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the Newton's world endures beyond her tragically abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was infrequently challenged. What was contested, especially in the initial period, were his reservations about the effectiveness of art: something he frequently talked about in interviews. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk 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], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a running commentary on money, matrimony, ethics, social class, the weakening of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a series of works that deal to great effect with the violation of civil liberties by authoritarian systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident incorrectly pronounced mad and confined in a room with an authentic psychiatric patient who believes himself in control of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the whole orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the brutal illogicalities of communist repression with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with irony and inflexibility with a