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All the finest dramatists push the boundaries of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their distinct manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized themes – from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of consciousness – and convert them into clever, inventive and regularly emotional plays. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a great glamorizer of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Encounter

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard early on. That was wholly thanks 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 present a mini-speech on two radio plays by a at that time obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer racked up an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained perfectly gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the workings of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances leading to our end. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the stillness, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive fusion of intellectual audacity and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a significant ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your average theatrical topic, 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 pain of a failing 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 Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs of the London Library where he was clutching a stack of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became ever more apparent. The breakthrough arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It raises a plethora of queries such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of personal instability and whether concepts such as fairness and national pride exist outside our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened realization of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, works because it is intensely touching. Ideas and feeling flawlessly coincide in a segment where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past civilizations to which her teacher replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the Newtonian universe outlasts her sadly truncated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was seldom questioned. What was contested, notably in the early years, were his doubts about the effectiveness of art: something he often discussed 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 housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a ongoing observation on finance, wedlock, ethics, class, the decline of the nobility and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a collection of works that grapple to powerful results with the violation of individual freedoms by authoritarian systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic wrongly declared crazy and locked in a cell with an authentic psychiatric patient who thinks he is in command of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the whole LSO on stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the harsh ridiculousness of communist repression with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and strictness with a