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Every one of the finest dramatists push the limits of theatre. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their unique manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized themes – ranging from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the mystery of consciousness – and transform them into clever, creative and regularly emotional theatrical works. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a significant glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Encounter

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to present a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a then little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer ran up an constantly rising cab 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 impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed exceptionally gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the nature of our world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances leading to our end. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the silence, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The distinctive fusion of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a significant philosophical question: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the subject of a speech being developed by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the a library in London where he was holding 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 sentiment of his plays became increasingly evident. The breakthrough arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It asks a multitude of issues such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of personal instability and whether notions such as justice and national pride exist outside our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened awareness of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and choice, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is intensely moving. Thoughts and feeling seamlessly come together in a moment where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past civilisations to which her teacher answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the Newtonian universe outlasts her sadly cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was infrequently doubted. What was contested, particularly in the beginning, were his skepticism about the efficacy of art: something he often talked about 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 hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a running commentary on finance, marriage, ethics, status, the decline of the nobility and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a number of works that deal to significant impact with the abuse of civil liberties by authoritarian regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic falsely declared insane and locked in a cell with an real psychiatric patient who imagines himself in control of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the harsh ridiculousness of communist repression with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a