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Every one of the finest dramatists push the boundaries of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their unique fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric topics – from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the mystery of the mind – and turn them into witty, inventive and frequently emotional plays. Theatre, Laurence Olivier once said, is a significant glamorizer of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Early Encounter

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard early on. That was entirely due to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to give a short talk on two radio plays by a back then little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer racked up an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck 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 appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained perfectly courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the nature of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we later came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling 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 indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the silence, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic fusion of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a big ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an universal, God-given law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the subject of a speech being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Revelation

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

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became increasingly apparent. The breakthrough arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to reproduction. It raises a whole host of questions such as whether any public commitment is the result of individual madness and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense consciousness of the bliss of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and volition, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is deeply touching. Ideas and emotion perfectly come together in a segment where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past civilisations to which her tutor answers: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the classical physics endures beyond her unfortunately cut short life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was infrequently questioned. What was debated, notably in the initial period, were his skepticism about the efficacy of art: something he regularly talked about in interviews. “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 housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a running commentary on wealth, matrimony, ethics, class, the decline of the aristocracy and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a number of works that deal to great effect with the abuse of individual freedoms by dictatorial systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist falsely declared insane and imprisoned in a room with an authentic madman who imagines himself in control of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the whole orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the brutal ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “force is met with irony and inflexibility with a