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Every one of the finest playwrights push the limits of drama. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their distinct fashion. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly specialized subjects – ranging from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the enigma of awareness – and convert them into clever, inventive and frequently touching dramas. Drama, the actor Olivier once said, is a significant glamoriser of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Early Encounter

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard early on. That was completely because of a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to give a short talk on two audio dramas by a at that time unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer ran up an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in 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 cleverness of both plays and eventually met their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed perfectly courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the nature of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the stillness, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic fusion of daring ideas and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a major philosophical question: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles followed an universal, God-given law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the focus of a talk being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the London Library where he was holding a pile of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became ever more apparent. The breakthrough likely came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to reproduction. It asks a multitude of issues such as whether any social obligation is the result of private derangement and whether concepts such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense awareness of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and volition, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a host of other things, functions because it is intensely moving. Concepts and sentiment perfectly merge in a moment where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past civilisations to which her instructor responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the classical physics endures beyond her tragically truncated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was infrequently questioned. What was discussed, notably in the initial period, were his skepticism about the power of art: something he often talked about in discussions. “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 housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a running commentary on wealth, marriage, ethics, social class, the fall of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a number of works that deal to significant impact with the violation of civil liberties by dictatorial systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly pronounced mad and locked in a cell with an authentic psychiatric patient who thinks he is in charge of an symphony. It was startling both to see the full LSO on stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the brutal illogicalities of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a