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Every one of the outstanding playwrights extend the limits of drama. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their own manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric themes – from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of consciousness – and convert them into witty, inventive and often touching theatrical works. Theatre, the actor Olivier noted, is a significant glamoriser of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Initial Encounter

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely due to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he invited me to give a brief lecture on two radio plays by a then obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer accumulated an skyrocketing cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed impeccably polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the nature of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was always 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 acclaimed for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the stillness, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The typical combination of intellectual audacity and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a big philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the topic of a lecture being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the a library in London where he was clutching a pile of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With time, the feeling of his plays became ever more visible. The key moment likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It asks a whole host of issues such as whether any social obligation is the result of private derangement and whether concepts such as fairness and patriotism exist beyond our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense realization of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and choice, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, functions because it is intensely moving. Concepts and feeling seamlessly coincide in a segment where a gifted youth, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past civilisations to which her instructor answers: “Scientific insights seen briefly and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe outlasts her sadly cut short life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was rarely challenged. What was discussed, especially in the initial period, were his skepticism about the efficacy of drama: 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 housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a running commentary on wealth, wedlock, morals, class, the weakening of the nobility and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a series of works that grapple to powerful results with the violation of individual freedoms by oppressive governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic wrongly pronounced crazy and imprisoned in a cell with an real lunatic who imagines himself in command of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the brutal ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and strictness with a