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Every one of the outstanding playwrights extend the limits of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their distinct way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized subjects – from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the mystery of the mind – and convert them into humorous, imaginative and frequently touching theatrical works. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a significant glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Initial Discovery

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly because of Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to give a brief lecture on two radio plays by a then unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer accumulated an ever escalating cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was impeccably courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the nature of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances resulting in our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the silence, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The typical combination of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a major philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions followed an absolute, God-given law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the focus of a lecture being developed by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the a library in London where he was clutching a mound of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the feeling of his plays became more and more visible. The key moment arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to revival. It asks a whole host of queries such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of personal instability and whether ideas such as fairness and national pride exist beyond our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute consciousness of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and volition, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, functions because it is deeply emotional. Thoughts and sentiment seamlessly come together in a scene where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past civilisations to which her tutor replies: “Scientific insights seen briefly and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the classical physics outlasts her tragically cut short life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was seldom questioned. What was discussed, especially in the initial period, were his skepticism about the efficacy of drama: something he often discussed 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 the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a running commentary on wealth, marriage, morals, class, the fall of the upper class and the rise of business. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a number of works that grapple to significant impact with the misuse of human rights by oppressive systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic wrongly diagnosed mad and imprisoned in a chamber with an genuine lunatic who thinks he is in control of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the entire orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the cruel ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a