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Every one of the outstanding playwrights extend the limits of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their distinct fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure topics – from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the enigma of the mind – and transform them into humorous, creative and often emotional plays. Theatre, the actor Olivier once said, is a significant embellisher of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Discovery

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard early on. That was entirely due to Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to present a mini-speech on two radio plays by a at that time little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer accumulated an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained impeccably courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the workings of our world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our end. 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 pushing back the stillness, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The typical combination of conceptual boldness and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a big moral issue: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether principles adhered to an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the topic of a lecture being prepared by the play’s main character, 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 risks of a unraveling society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the London Library where he was gripping a pile of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the feeling of his plays became more and more apparent. The key moment perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to revival. It asks a whole host of issues such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of individual madness and whether concepts such as justice and national pride exist outside our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened consciousness of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and volition, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is deeply moving. Ideas and emotion perfectly merge in a scene where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past civilizations to which her teacher replies: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the Newton's world endures beyond her tragically abbreviated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was rarely questioned. What was debated, particularly in the early years, were his reservations about the effectiveness of art: something he frequently discussed in conversations. “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 housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a ongoing observation on money, wedlock, values, social class, the decline of the upper class and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a number of works that grapple to powerful results with the abuse of civil liberties by oppressive governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly pronounced mad and locked in a cell with an real lunatic who imagines himself in command of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the full orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the brutal ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “force is met with irony and strictness with a