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All the finest playwrights push the limits of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their distinct way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized topics – ranging from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the puzzle of the mind – and convert them into witty, inventive and often moving dramas. Theatre, Laurence Olivier once said, is a powerful glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Early Discovery

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was completely thanks to Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a at that time obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer accumulated an skyrocketing taxi bill. 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 struck by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed perfectly courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the ways of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances leading to our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The typical fusion of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a significant moral issue: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the focus of a speech being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was holding a mound of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly evident. The key moment perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to revival. It poses a plethora of issues such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of personal instability and whether ideas such as justice and patriotism exist beyond our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly touching. Thoughts and emotion flawlessly merge in a segment where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past cultures to which her instructor responds: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newton's world survives her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was rarely doubted. What was contested, notably in the early years, were his reservations about the effectiveness of art: something he often talked about in conversations. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a running commentary on finance, wedlock, morals, social class, the weakening of the upper class and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a series of works that engage to great effect with the violation of civil liberties by authoritarian regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic incorrectly declared insane and confined in a chamber with an genuine lunatic who believes himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the brutal ridiculousness of communist repression with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “force is met with irony and rigidity with a