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Every one of the great dramatists extend the limits of drama. Beckett and Pinter did it in their unique way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure subjects – ranging from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the enigma of the mind – and convert them into witty, creative and regularly touching theatrical works. The stage, Laurence Olivier once said, is a great glamorizer of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Introduction

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly due to Philip French, who, aside from being a film critic, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he asked me to give a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a back then unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer racked up an constantly rising cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet 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 currently admire – he remained exceptionally courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the workings of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the beginning, 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 eventually came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances causing our demise. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the quiet, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The distinctive fusion of intellectual audacity and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a significant ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions followed an absolute, God-given law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the topic of a speech being developed 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 perils of a unraveling society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Breakthrough

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

With time, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly apparent. The key moment perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to restaging. It poses a whole host of issues such as whether any social obligation is the result of private derangement 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 acute consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, succeeds because it is intensely emotional. Concepts and sentiment flawlessly come together in a segment where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past civilizations to which her instructor responds: “Scientific insights caught sight of and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the classical physics survives her tragically cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was rarely questioned. What was debated, notably in the beginning, were his doubts about the effectiveness of art: something he regularly talked about in conversations. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a running commentary on money, marriage, morals, social class, the fall of the aristocracy and the rise of business. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a number of works that deal to great effect with the misuse of civil liberties by authoritarian governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident falsely pronounced mad and locked in a room with an authentic lunatic who imagines himself in charge of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the brutal absurdities of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “force is met with wit and inflexibility with a