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Every one of the finest dramatists push the limits of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their own manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric topics – from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the enigma of consciousness – and turn them into humorous, imaginative and regularly touching theatrical works. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a significant embellisher of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Early Introduction

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely due to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he requested that I to present a brief lecture on two radio plays by a then obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer accumulated an constantly rising taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was perfectly gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the workings of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the silence, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic blend of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a significant philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the topic of a speech being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the anguish of a fractured marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was clutching a mound of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became more and more evident. The turning point arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It poses a multitude of queries such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of individual madness and whether notions such as justice and national pride exist beyond our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened realization of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and free will, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a host of other things, works because it is profoundly touching. Concepts and emotion perfectly come together in a segment where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, laments the loss of past civilizations to which her instructor replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was rarely challenged. What was contested, particularly in the early years, were his reservations about the effectiveness of drama: something he frequently explored in discussions. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a continuous critique on wealth, marriage, ethics, class, the fall of the upper class and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a number of works that grapple to significant impact with the misuse of civil liberties by dictatorial systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident falsely diagnosed crazy and confined in a room with an authentic lunatic who imagines himself in charge of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the brutal absurdities of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with wit and rigidity with a