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Every one of the finest playwrights extend the limits of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their distinct fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure themes – from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the enigma of consciousness – and turn them into humorous, creative and regularly touching plays. Theatre, the actor Olivier remarked, is a great glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Discovery

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was completely because of Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to present a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a back then obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer accumulated an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed perfectly courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the nature of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances causing our end. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the quiet, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive blend of daring ideas and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a major philosophical question: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the subject of a lecture 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 anguish of a failing marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Revelation

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

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly evident. The turning point arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It poses a whole host of questions such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of private derangement and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute consciousness of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and free will, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a host of other things, works because it is profoundly touching. Ideas and sentiment seamlessly merge in a segment where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past civilisations to which her tutor answers: “Scientific insights seen briefly and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the classical physics endures beyond her sadly truncated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was infrequently questioned. What was discussed, particularly in the beginning, were his doubts about the effectiveness of theatre: something he regularly discussed in discussions. “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 compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a continuous critique on finance, matrimony, values, status, the fall of the nobility and the rise of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a number of works that engage to significant impact with the misuse of human rights by dictatorial regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly diagnosed insane and confined in a room with an authentic lunatic who believes himself in command of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the full LSO on the stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the harsh ridiculousness of communist repression with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “force is met with wit and rigidity with a