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Every one of the finest playwrights push the limits of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their own fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly esoteric themes – ranging from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the enigma of the mind – and transform them into clever, creative and often emotional theatrical works. Theatre, the actor Olivier noted, is a significant glamoriser of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Initial Introduction

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely due to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a back then unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer ran up an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver 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 got to meet their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed impeccably gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he knew the ways of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances leading to our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the silence, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic blend of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a significant ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether ethical rules followed an universal, 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 saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was gripping a stack of books that reached 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 ever more visible. The turning point arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to revival. It asks a multitude of issues such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of individual madness and whether notions such as justice and national pride exist beyond our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened realization of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and free will, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, works because it is deeply touching. Thoughts and feeling perfectly come together in a scene where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, laments the loss of past civilisations to which her teacher replies: “Scientific insights glimpsed and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the Newton's world outlasts her sadly cut short life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was rarely doubted. What was contested, particularly in the beginning, were his doubts about the efficacy of drama: something he regularly discussed in conversations. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a continuous critique on money, marriage, ethics, class, the weakening of the upper class and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a number of works that engage to great effect with the violation of individual freedoms by dictatorial governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident incorrectly pronounced crazy and locked in a room with an authentic madman who believes himself in control of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the entire orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard exposing the brutal absurdities of communist repression with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and strictness with a