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All the finest playwrights push the limits of theatre. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their own way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized themes – ranging from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the puzzle of the mind – and transform them into clever, inventive and frequently moving dramas. Drama, the actor Olivier noted, is a significant glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to bring concepts to life.

Initial Discovery

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard early on. That was wholly because of a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to present a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a then little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer racked up an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was exceptionally gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the ways of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral 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 casualties of arbitrary circumstances resulting in 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 language is all. The word is resisting the stillness, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The typical fusion of daring ideas and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a big moral issue: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an absolute, God-given law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the subject 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 dangers of a unraveling society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the a library in London where he was holding a pile of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly evident. The breakthrough perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to reproduction. It raises a whole host of queries such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of individual madness and whether ideas such as fairness and national pride exist outside our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened consciousness of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, functions because it is deeply moving. Ideas and sentiment perfectly merge in a segment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past cultures to which her tutor replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe outlasts her tragically abbreviated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was rarely challenged. What was contested, particularly in the initial period, were his reservations about the efficacy of drama: something he often talked about in interviews. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no qualms 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 completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a continuous critique on wealth, marriage, morals, status, the weakening of the upper class and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a number of works that grapple to significant impact with the misuse of civil liberties by authoritarian systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly diagnosed mad and confined in a chamber with an authentic lunatic who imagines himself in command of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the whole orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the brutal absurdities of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with irony and strictness with a