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Every one of the great playwrights broaden the limits of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their distinct manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure topics – from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the mystery of consciousness – and convert them into clever, inventive and often touching dramas. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a significant glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Initial Introduction

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely because of a man named Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a short talk on two audio dramas by a at that time unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer racked up an constantly rising taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit 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 remained perfectly polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the nature of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we finally 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 crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances causing our end. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the quiet, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The characteristic fusion of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a significant ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether principles followed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the focus of a speech being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was gripping a stack of books that came 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 apparent. The turning point likely came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to reproduction. It asks a whole host of issues such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of personal instability and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened realization of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and free will, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is intensely emotional. Thoughts and emotion flawlessly coincide in a moment where a gifted youth, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past civilisations to which her teacher replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the Newtonian universe survives her tragically abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was infrequently questioned. What was discussed, especially in the early years, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of drama: something he frequently discussed in discussions. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person 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], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a running commentary on wealth, wedlock, ethics, class, the weakening of the aristocracy and the dominance of business. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a collection of works that engage to great effect with the abuse of human rights by dictatorial systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic falsely declared mad and imprisoned in a room with an genuine lunatic who believes himself in charge of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the full orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard revealing the harsh ridiculousness of communist repression with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “force is met with wit and rigidity with a