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All the finest playwrights extend the limits of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their unique manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric topics – ranging from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the mystery of awareness – and convert them into witty, inventive and frequently moving plays. Theatre, the actor Olivier noted, is a significant embellisher of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Initial Discovery

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard early on. That was wholly because of a man named Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to give a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a back then obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer racked up an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was perfectly courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the ways of our world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances resulting in our demise. 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 resisting the silence, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The typical blend of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a significant philosophical question: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether principles obeyed an universal, 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 experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was gripping a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly evident. The breakthrough perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to restaging. It asks a multitude of queries such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of private derangement and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened awareness of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, works because it is deeply touching. Thoughts and feeling perfectly come together in a segment where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, laments the loss of past civilisations to which her instructor replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the classical physics outlasts her tragically truncated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was seldom questioned. What was discussed, particularly in the early years, were his doubts about the efficacy of art: something he often discussed in interviews. “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 entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a running commentary on money, marriage, ethics, class, the weakening of the nobility and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a number of works that deal to powerful results with the abuse of civil liberties by authoritarian systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident wrongly declared crazy and locked in a cell with an real psychiatric patient who thinks he is in control of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the brutal illogicalities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with wit and strictness with a