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Every one of the great playwrights push the limits of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their own way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric subjects – ranging from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the enigma of awareness – and turn them into witty, creative and regularly moving dramas. Theatre, Laurence Olivier noted, is a powerful glamoriser of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Early Encounter

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely due to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to give a brief lecture on two radio plays by a back then little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer racked up an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained impeccably courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the nature of the media.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed 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 realise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed 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 prey of random circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the quiet, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The characteristic blend of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a major moral issue: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the topic of a lecture being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a fractured marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the a library in London where he was holding a mound of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became more and more apparent. The breakthrough likely came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It raises a multitude of queries such as whether any public commitment is the result of personal instability and whether concepts such as fairness and national pride exist outside our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense awareness of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is intensely touching. Ideas and feeling flawlessly come together in a moment where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past civilizations to which her instructor responds: “Scientific insights glimpsed and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her tragically cut short life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was infrequently questioned. What was contested, notably in the beginning, were his doubts about the power of theatre: something he often explored in discussions. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], 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 finance, marriage, morals, status, the decline of the aristocracy and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a collection of works that grapple to significant impact with the misuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident wrongly declared insane and confined in a room with an genuine madman who believes himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the full orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the harsh absurdities of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with irony and strictness with a