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Every one of the outstanding playwrights push the boundaries of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their unique way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric topics – ranging from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the mystery of awareness – and turn them into clever, inventive and often emotional dramas. The stage, Laurence Olivier noted, is a great embellisher of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Encounter

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely because of Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a short talk on two audio dramas by a back then obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer accumulated an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed exceptionally polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the nature of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we in time 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 cleverness in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances causing our demise. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive blend of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a major ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions followed an absolute, God-given law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the focus of a speech being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was gripping a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became ever more apparent. The turning point arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It raises a plethora of queries such as whether any social obligation is the result of personal instability and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist outside our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened realization of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and choice, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly touching. Ideas and emotion flawlessly come together in a segment where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, laments the demise of past civilizations to which her tutor answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the Newtonian universe outlasts her unfortunately truncated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was seldom questioned. What was contested, especially in the early years, were his reservations about the power of art: something he regularly talked about 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 allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a ongoing observation on wealth, marriage, values, class, the decline of the upper class and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a number of works that engage to great effect with the abuse of civil liberties by oppressive systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic incorrectly declared mad and locked in a cell with an real psychiatric patient who imagines himself in command of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard revealing the brutal absurdities of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with irony and inflexibility with a