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All the finest playwrights extend the limits of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their own manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure topics – ranging from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the enigma of the mind – and convert them into humorous, creative and frequently emotional dramas. The stage, the actor Olivier remarked, is a powerful glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Introduction

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly due to Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I 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 impoverished writer ran up an constantly rising taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed exceptionally polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the ways of our world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our demise. 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 dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The distinctive combination of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a major ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the topic of a lecture being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was clutching a mound of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly visible. The breakthrough perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to reproduction. It asks a whole host of questions such as whether any public commitment is the result of personal instability and whether notions such as justice and patriotism exist beyond our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and free will, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is deeply touching. Thoughts and emotion seamlessly come together in a moment where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, laments the demise of past civilizations to which her tutor replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the classical physics outlasts her unfortunately cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was rarely questioned. What was discussed, especially in the early years, were his reservations about the power of theatre: something he often discussed in conversations. “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 Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a ongoing observation on wealth, marriage, ethics, status, the weakening of the upper class and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a series of works that grapple to powerful results with the violation of individual freedoms by dictatorial governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident incorrectly pronounced mad and confined in a chamber with an authentic psychiatric patient who believes himself in charge of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the entire LSO on stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the cruel illogicalities of communist repression with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and strictness with a