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Every one of the finest dramatists extend the limits of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their own manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric themes – from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the enigma of the mind – and turn them into witty, imaginative and frequently moving theatrical works. Theatre, Laurence Olivier noted, is a powerful glamoriser of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Introduction

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely because of Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a brief lecture on two radio plays by a at that time little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer accumulated an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

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

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances leading to our end. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the silence, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive fusion of conceptual boldness and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a big ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether principles adhered to an universal, God-given law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the topic of a talk being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was clutching a mound of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With time, the emotional content of his plays became more and more evident. The turning point likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to restaging. It poses a whole host of issues such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of individual madness and whether notions such as justice and patriotism exist independent of our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute awareness of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and choice, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is deeply moving. Concepts and emotion flawlessly come together in a moment where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past civilisations to which her instructor responds: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the classical physics endures beyond her tragically truncated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was infrequently challenged. What was discussed, particularly in the beginning, were his doubts about the efficacy of theatre: something he often discussed in conversations. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a running commentary on money, marriage, values, social class, the fall of the upper class and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a series of works that grapple to great effect with the misuse of human rights by dictatorial systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident falsely diagnosed insane and locked in a room with an real lunatic who thinks he is in command of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the full LSO on stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the harsh ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and strictness with a