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All the outstanding playwrights broaden the limits of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their unique manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric subjects – ranging from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the mystery of awareness – and transform them into witty, imaginative and frequently touching dramas. The stage, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a great glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Discovery

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was completely due to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a back then unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer accumulated an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained impeccably polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the workings of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic fusion of daring ideas and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a big moral issue: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the subject of a talk being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the a library in London where he was gripping a mound of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became ever more visible. The breakthrough arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to restaging. It raises a plethora of queries such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of individual madness and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist beyond our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense consciousness of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and free will, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly touching. Ideas and emotion perfectly coincide in a segment where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past civilisations to which her teacher answers: “Scientific insights seen briefly and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her tragically cut short life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was infrequently questioned. What was debated, particularly in the beginning, were his skepticism about the efficacy of art: something he often explored in discussions. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a running commentary on wealth, wedlock, values, status, the fall of the upper class and the dominance of business. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a number of works that grapple to significant impact with the misuse of individual freedoms by oppressive regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident incorrectly declared crazy and locked in a cell with an real psychiatric patient who imagines himself in control of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the harsh illogicalities of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with wit and rigidity with a