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All the great dramatists push the limits of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their distinct way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure topics – ranging from chaos theory to ethical thought and the mystery of the mind – and turn them into humorous, imaginative and regularly emotional theatrical works. The stage, the actor Olivier remarked, is a powerful glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to bring concepts to life.

Early Encounter

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard early on. That was completely thanks to Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a short talk on two broadcast plays by a then unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer ran up an skyrocketing cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed impeccably gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the ways of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances resulting in our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed 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 quiet, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive fusion of conceptual boldness and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a major ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an unchanging, God-given law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the subject of a talk being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was gripping a pile of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became more and more visible. The turning point perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to revival. It asks a multitude of queries such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of individual madness and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist beyond our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense consciousness of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is intensely moving. Thoughts and feeling flawlessly coincide in a scene where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past civilizations to which her tutor answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the Newtonian universe outlasts her tragically truncated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was infrequently challenged. What was contested, especially in the initial period, were his reservations about the efficacy of art: something he regularly 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 shit if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a ongoing observation on wealth, matrimony, morals, class, the decline of the aristocracy and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a number of works that engage to significant impact with the violation of individual freedoms by authoritarian regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic incorrectly declared insane and locked in a chamber with an real lunatic who thinks he is in charge of an symphony. It was startling both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the cruel absurdities of communist repression with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with wit and rigidity with a