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Every one of the outstanding dramatists broaden the limits of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their distinct manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized themes – from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of the mind – and turn them into witty, imaginative and often emotional theatrical works. Drama, Laurence Olivier once said, is a powerful glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Introduction

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard early on. That was entirely due to Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to give a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a then unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer ran up an ever escalating taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was exceptionally gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the ways of our world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its brilliance 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 arbitrary circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the stillness, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic fusion of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a big moral issue: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the topic of a speech being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Affecting Breakthrough

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

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became ever more visible. The breakthrough arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to revival. It asks a multitude of queries such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of personal instability and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense realization of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is deeply emotional. Ideas and emotion seamlessly coincide in a moment where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, laments the demise of past cultures to which her tutor replies: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the Newtonian universe survives her unfortunately cut short life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was rarely doubted. What was discussed, particularly in the initial period, were his reservations about the efficacy of theatre: something he often discussed in interviews. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a ongoing observation on finance, marriage, ethics, status, the decline of the nobility and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a series of works that grapple to powerful results with the violation of human rights by dictatorial systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic incorrectly declared mad and confined in a chamber with an genuine psychiatric patient who thinks he is in charge of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the brutal ridiculousness of communist repression with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a