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Every one of the finest playwrights push the limits of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their own fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric topics – ranging from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of consciousness – and transform them into clever, creative and often emotional plays. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a significant embellisher of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Early Encounter

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard early on. That was completely thanks 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 deliver a short talk on two audio dramas by a then unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer racked up an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained exceptionally courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the nature of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the stillness, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The typical blend of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a major ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the focus of a talk being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was gripping a stack of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the feeling of his plays became ever more evident. The turning point likely came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to restaging. It raises a plethora of queries such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of individual madness and whether ideas such as justice and national pride exist beyond our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and free will, classicism and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is deeply touching. Thoughts and sentiment seamlessly coincide in a moment where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past civilisations to which her instructor answers: “Scientific insights caught sight of and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the Newton's world outlasts her sadly truncated life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was seldom questioned. What was contested, especially in the beginning, were his doubts about the power of drama: 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 the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a continuous critique on finance, matrimony, values, class, the decline of the upper class and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a collection of works that grapple to great effect with the abuse of civil liberties by dictatorial systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic incorrectly pronounced mad and confined in a cell with an authentic madman who imagines himself in command of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the entire orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the cruel ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with irony and strictness with a