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Every one of the outstanding dramatists push the limits of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their unique fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure topics – from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the puzzle of awareness – and turn them into clever, imaginative and regularly emotional dramas. Theatre, the actor Olivier once said, is a powerful glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Early Discovery

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to present a mini-speech on two radio plays by a back then obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer racked up an constantly rising 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 impressed by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was impeccably polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the ways of our world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we in time 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 crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all victims of random circumstances leading to our demise. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the stillness, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The characteristic blend of conceptual boldness and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a major ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether principles obeyed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the subject of a speech being developed by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs of the London Library where he was gripping a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became more and more apparent. The breakthrough likely came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to reproduction. It poses a multitude of queries such as whether any public commitment is the result of private derangement and whether ideas such as justice and national pride exist independent of our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute realization of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and volition, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly touching. Ideas and emotion flawlessly merge in a scene where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past civilizations to which her instructor replies: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the Newtonian universe outlasts her unfortunately cut short life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was seldom challenged. What was debated, especially in the early years, were his reservations about the efficacy of theatre: something he frequently discussed in discussions. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a continuous critique on wealth, matrimony, morals, class, the decline of the nobility and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a collection of works that deal to significant impact with the abuse of human rights by dictatorial governments. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident incorrectly diagnosed crazy and imprisoned in a chamber with an authentic lunatic who believes himself in control of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the entire orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the brutal illogicalities of communist repression with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with wit and inflexibility with a