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All the finest dramatists extend the limits of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their distinct manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric subjects – ranging from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the mystery of the mind – and convert them into clever, creative and often touching theatrical works. The stage, the actor Olivier once said, is a powerful embellisher of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Early Encounter

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly thanks to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a back then obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer accumulated an constantly rising cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the voice of the time. I was impressed 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 gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed perfectly gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the ways of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the stillness, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive blend of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a significant moral issue: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules followed an absolute, God-given law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the focus of a lecture being prepared 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 fractured marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was holding a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became ever more apparent. The breakthrough perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It raises a multitude of questions such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of individual madness and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist beyond our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened consciousness of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and free will, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is intensely moving. Thoughts and sentiment flawlessly coincide in a moment where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past civilisations to which her tutor answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the classical physics outlasts her unfortunately cut short life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was infrequently questioned. What was discussed, particularly in the early years, were his doubts about the efficacy of drama: something he often talked about in discussions. “I used to feel out on a limb,” 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 hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a running commentary on finance, wedlock, morals, class, the decline of the upper class and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a collection of works that engage to great effect with the violation of civil liberties by authoritarian governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic incorrectly pronounced crazy and confined in a cell with an authentic madman who thinks he is in control of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the full LSO on stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the cruel absurdities of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with wit and inflexibility with a