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Every one of the great dramatists extend the limits of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their own fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized topics – from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the enigma of the mind – and convert them into clever, inventive and frequently moving plays. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a great embellisher of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Initial Discovery

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard early on. That was completely because of Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a at that time little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer accumulated an ever escalating cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained exceptionally polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the ways of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances leading to our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the stillness, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The distinctive combination of intellectual audacity and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a significant ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the focus of a talk being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the London Library where he was holding a pile of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With time, the emotional content of his plays became more and more apparent. The turning point arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It raises a multitude of issues such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of personal instability and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist beyond our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense realization of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and volition, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, works because it is deeply touching. Ideas and sentiment perfectly coincide in a moment where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, laments the demise of past cultures to which her tutor responds: “Scientific insights caught sight of and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was seldom challenged. What was discussed, notably in the early years, were his doubts about the efficacy of drama: something he regularly explored in discussions. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a ongoing observation on finance, matrimony, ethics, social class, the weakening of the upper class and the rise of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a number of works that grapple to great effect with the abuse of human rights by authoritarian systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly diagnosed crazy and locked in a chamber with an authentic madman who believes himself in charge of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the entire LSO on the stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the cruel illogicalities of communist repression with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with irony and rigidity with a