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Every one of the finest playwrights push the limits of drama. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their distinct way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized themes – ranging from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the mystery of the mind – and convert them into humorous, imaginative and regularly moving dramas. Theatre, the actor Olivier once said, is a significant glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Discovery

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a short talk on two broadcast plays by a at that time unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer racked up an ever escalating taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was impeccably courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the ways of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by individuals and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances causing our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic combination of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a significant philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the topic of a speech being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the London Library where he was clutching a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became ever more visible. The key moment likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to reproduction. It raises a plethora of questions such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of personal instability and whether ideas such as fairness and national pride exist outside our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute consciousness of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and volition, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly moving. Concepts and emotion perfectly merge in a moment where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past civilizations to which her instructor responds: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the Newton's world survives her unfortunately truncated life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was seldom questioned. What was discussed, notably in the beginning, were his skepticism about the efficacy of drama: something he often talked about in discussions. “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 the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a running commentary on finance, wedlock, morals, class, the decline of the aristocracy and the dominance of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a collection of works that engage to great effect with the violation of human rights by oppressive governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident wrongly diagnosed crazy and confined in a room with an authentic psychiatric patient who believes himself in command of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the whole orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the cruel absurdities of communist repression with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with irony and rigidity with a