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Every one of the outstanding playwrights extend the limits of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their distinct way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized themes – ranging from chaos theory to ethical thought and the puzzle of awareness – and convert them into clever, creative and regularly moving plays. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a significant embellisher of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Encounter

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly because of a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to give a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a at that time little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer accumulated an ever escalating taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was exceptionally gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the ways of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances causing our end. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the silence, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The typical fusion of daring ideas and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a big moral issue: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether principles adhered to an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the topic of a lecture being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the London Library where he was clutching a mound of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With time, the emotional content of his plays became more and more apparent. The breakthrough likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to revival. It poses a whole host of questions such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of personal instability and whether concepts such as justice and national pride exist independent of our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense awareness of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, works because it is intensely emotional. Thoughts and emotion seamlessly coincide in a moment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, laments the demise of past civilizations to which her tutor responds: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the classical physics outlasts her tragically abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was seldom questioned. What was debated, especially in the initial period, were his skepticism about the power of theatre: something he frequently explored in discussions. “I used to feel out on a limb,” 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 hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a ongoing observation on money, matrimony, values, social class, the decline of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a collection of works that deal to significant impact with the violation of individual freedoms by oppressive governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident wrongly diagnosed mad and imprisoned in a room with an real psychiatric patient who imagines himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the whole LSO on the stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the brutal absurdities of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with irony and rigidity with a