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Every one of the outstanding playwrights extend the limits of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their distinct manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure themes – from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the enigma of the mind – and transform them into clever, imaginative and frequently touching plays. Drama, the actor Olivier noted, is a powerful glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Early Encounter

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely thanks to Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to present a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a at that time obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer racked up an constantly rising taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was perfectly gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the ways of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances causing our demise. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the stillness, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic fusion of daring ideas and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a significant philosophical question: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether principles adhered to an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the subject of a speech 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 pain of a fractured marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with playwright 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, encountering him on the stairs of the London Library where he was holding a stack of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became more and more visible. The key moment perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to reproduction. It asks a whole host of queries such as whether any civic duty is the result of individual madness and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist outside our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened awareness of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly touching. Ideas and emotion seamlessly come together in a segment where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past cultures to which her teacher replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the classical physics survives her tragically cut short life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was seldom doubted. What was discussed, particularly in the early years, were his skepticism about the efficacy of art: something he often discussed in discussions. “I used to feel out on a limb,” 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 compunction about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a running commentary on finance, matrimony, morals, class, the decline of the upper class and the dominance of business. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a number of works that grapple to significant impact with the violation of individual freedoms by dictatorial regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly pronounced mad and locked in a chamber with an authentic madman who thinks he is in control of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the full orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the brutal ridiculousness of communist repression with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with irony and strictness with a