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Every one of the outstanding playwrights push the boundaries of drama. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their unique way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized topics – ranging from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of the mind – and convert them into witty, imaginative and frequently emotional dramas. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a great glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Discovery

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly due to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a back then unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer ran up an skyrocketing cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed exceptionally gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the nature of our world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is resisting the silence, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The distinctive fusion of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a major moral issue: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether principles followed an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the topic of a talk being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a fractured marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the London Library where he was clutching a stack 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 evident. The turning point arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It poses a plethora of issues such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of private derangement and whether concepts such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense realization of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and free will, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly moving. Concepts and emotion perfectly coincide in a segment where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past civilisations to which her tutor responds: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the classical physics outlasts her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was rarely challenged. What was discussed, especially in the initial period, were his doubts about the efficacy of art: something he often 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 bad person if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a ongoing observation on wealth, matrimony, values, status, the weakening of the nobility and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a series of works that engage to powerful results with the abuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident wrongly diagnosed insane and locked in a chamber with an real psychiatric patient who thinks he is in command of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the whole orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard exposing the brutal ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with wit and inflexibility with a