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All the outstanding playwrights push the limits of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their own manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized topics – ranging from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the enigma of awareness – and transform them into humorous, inventive and frequently emotional plays. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a great embellisher of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Early Encounter

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard early on. That was completely thanks to Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a back then little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer ran up an skyrocketing cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained perfectly polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the workings of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances leading to our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the stillness, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic fusion of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a significant ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the topic of a speech being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs of the London Library where he was holding a mound of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became more and more visible. The breakthrough arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to revival. It raises a plethora of queries such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of private derangement 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 consciousness of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and choice, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, functions because it is profoundly touching. Concepts and emotion seamlessly merge in a moment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past civilizations to which her tutor responds: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the Newtonian universe survives her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was seldom questioned. What was discussed, particularly in the beginning, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of theatre: something he often discussed in conversations. “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 qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a continuous critique on wealth, marriage, morals, social class, the weakening of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a number of works that deal to great effect with the abuse of civil liberties by oppressive governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident incorrectly declared mad and imprisoned in a cell with an authentic madman who imagines himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the cruel absurdities of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a