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Every one of the great playwrights broaden the limits of drama. Beckett and Pinter did it in their own manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized themes – from chaos theory to ethical thought and the enigma of awareness – and turn them into humorous, imaginative and regularly emotional dramas. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a significant glamorizer of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Early Encounter

I was lucky enough to discover 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 requested that I to present 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 racked up an constantly rising 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 emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed impeccably polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the workings of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances leading to our end. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the silence, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The distinctive fusion of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a significant philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the focus of a speech 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 suffering of a broken marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the London Library where he was gripping a mound of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With time, the emotional content of his plays became ever more apparent. The breakthrough likely came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to revival. It asks a plethora of issues such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of personal instability and whether notions such as justice and national pride exist beyond our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense consciousness of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and free will, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is deeply emotional. Concepts and feeling perfectly coincide in a segment where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past cultures to which her tutor replies: “Scientific insights seen briefly and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the Newtonian universe survives her unfortunately cut short life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was infrequently questioned. What was discussed, particularly in the beginning, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of theatre: something he frequently explored in conversations. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a continuous critique on wealth, marriage, ethics, class, the decline of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a collection of works that grapple to significant impact with the misuse of civil liberties by dictatorial systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident wrongly pronounced crazy and imprisoned in a chamber with an genuine lunatic who believes himself in charge of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the full orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the cruel ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with irony and strictness with a