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All the great playwrights push the limits of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their unique manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure themes – ranging from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of the mind – and turn them into witty, imaginative and regularly emotional theatrical works. Theatre, the actor Olivier once said, is a significant glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Introduction

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard early on. That was entirely because of Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a then unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer racked up an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed impeccably polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the ways of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its ingenuity 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 arbitrary circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the silence, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic combination of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a major philosophical question: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the topic of a talk being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the a library in London where he was holding a pile of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With time, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly visible. The breakthrough perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It poses a plethora of queries such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of individual madness and whether concepts such as fairness and patriotism exist beyond our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense awareness of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, works because it is deeply moving. Ideas and feeling perfectly coincide in a segment where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past civilizations to which her instructor answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the Newton's world endures beyond her tragically truncated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was infrequently doubted. What was discussed, particularly in the initial period, were his skepticism about the power of theatre: something he often discussed in discussions. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk 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 meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a continuous critique on wealth, marriage, values, social class, the decline of the aristocracy and the rise of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a number of works that deal to significant impact with the misuse of civil liberties by authoritarian systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident incorrectly diagnosed crazy and locked in a room with an genuine lunatic who thinks he is in charge of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the entire LSO on the stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the brutal absurdities of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and strictness with a