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Every one of the great dramatists push the limits of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their distinct fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized themes – from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the enigma of awareness – and convert them into clever, inventive and regularly emotional plays. Theatre, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a significant embellisher of ideas. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Early Introduction

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard early on. That was wholly thanks to Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a at that time little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer ran up an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was perfectly polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the nature of the media.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances leading to our end. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the stillness, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic fusion of daring ideas and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a significant moral issue: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether principles followed an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the topic of a talk being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was gripping a stack of books that rose 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 visible. The turning point perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to restaging. It raises a multitude of queries such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of private derangement and whether notions such as justice and patriotism exist beyond our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense consciousness of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and volition, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is intensely touching. Ideas and emotion seamlessly come together in a scene where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, laments the demise of past cultures to which her instructor answers: “Scientific insights caught sight of and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her sadly cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

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

I believe he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a continuous critique on finance, wedlock, values, class, the decline of the nobility and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a series of works that deal to great effect with the abuse of individual freedoms by authoritarian regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic incorrectly diagnosed crazy and locked in a chamber with an authentic lunatic who imagines himself in command of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the harsh absurdities of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with wit and inflexibility with a