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All the finest playwrights push the limits of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their unique way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure themes – from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the mystery of the mind – and convert them into humorous, creative and frequently touching plays. Theatre, Laurence Olivier once said, is a significant glamoriser of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Early Encounter

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard early on. That was entirely thanks to Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a mini-speech on two radio plays by a back then unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer ran up 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 time announcement service. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained impeccably gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the ways of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances causing our demise. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the stillness, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic combination of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a big moral issue: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions followed an universal, God-given law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the focus of a lecture being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the anguish of a broken marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the steps 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 responded.

With the years, the feeling of his plays became increasingly evident. The breakthrough likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to revival. It asks a plethora of issues such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of personal instability and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened realization of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and choice, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, works because it is intensely touching. Thoughts and sentiment seamlessly come together in a segment where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past civilizations to which her tutor responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the classical physics endures beyond her tragically cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was seldom doubted. What was discussed, especially in the early years, were his reservations about the power of art: something he regularly talked about in conversations. “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 avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a continuous critique on wealth, wedlock, ethics, status, the decline of the nobility and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a series of works that deal to significant impact with the misuse of human rights by oppressive regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly diagnosed insane and locked in a chamber with an genuine madman who imagines himself in command of an symphony. It was startling both to see the full orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the cruel absurdities of communist repression with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with wit and rigidity with a