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Every one of the finest dramatists push the limits of drama. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their distinct manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric topics – from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of consciousness – and turn them into humorous, inventive and frequently emotional plays. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a significant glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Introduction

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard early on. That was wholly thanks to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to give a short talk on two radio plays by a at that time unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer accumulated an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained impeccably gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the ways of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances leading to our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The typical blend of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a major philosophical question: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles followed an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the topic of a speech being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the London Library where he was clutching a stack of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly evident. The turning point perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to reproduction. It asks a plethora of issues such as whether any social obligation is the result of individual madness and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute awareness of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and volition, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is intensely emotional. Concepts and feeling flawlessly come together in a scene where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, laments the demise of past civilizations to which her tutor replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the classical physics survives her sadly abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was rarely doubted. What was debated, notably in the initial period, were his reservations about the power of art: something he regularly discussed in interviews. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a ongoing observation on wealth, marriage, values, status, the weakening of the aristocracy and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a series of works that grapple to powerful results with the misuse of human rights by dictatorial governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic incorrectly pronounced insane and imprisoned in a chamber with an authentic lunatic who imagines himself in control of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard exposing the cruel illogicalities of communist repression with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a