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All the outstanding playwrights push the limits of drama. Beckett and Pinter did it in their distinct way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure themes – ranging from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of awareness – and transform them into humorous, inventive and frequently emotional plays. Drama, the actor Olivier once said, is a powerful glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Discovery

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely because of a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to present a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a then unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer ran up an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained impeccably gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the workings of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we in time 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 ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances causing our demise. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive blend of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a big philosophical question: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles followed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the focus of a speech being developed by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped 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 former minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was gripping a stack of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the years, the feeling of his plays became increasingly evident. The key moment likely came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to reproduction. It asks a whole host of queries such as whether any social obligation is the result of private derangement and whether ideas such as fairness and national pride exist outside our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened awareness of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and free will, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, works because it is profoundly touching. Concepts and emotion flawlessly coincide in a scene where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past cultures to which her teacher replies: “Scientific insights glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the Newton's world outlasts her tragically truncated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was rarely questioned. What was discussed, especially in the beginning, were his skepticism about the efficacy of art: something he often discussed in interviews. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a continuous critique on money, wedlock, ethics, class, the fall of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a number of works that deal to significant impact with the violation of civil liberties by authoritarian systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic falsely declared crazy and imprisoned in a cell with an genuine lunatic who believes himself in command of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the entire LSO on stage and to see Stoppard revealing the cruel ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with irony and inflexibility with a