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All the outstanding playwrights push the limits of drama. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their unique manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure topics – from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the enigma of the mind – and turn them into humorous, creative and frequently touching dramas. Theatre, the actor Olivier remarked, is a great embellisher of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Discovery

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he invited me to present a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a then little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer accumulated an skyrocketing cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed exceptionally gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the ways of our world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances leading to our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the quiet, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic blend of daring ideas and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a major philosophical question: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether principles obeyed an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the focus of a speech being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Revelation

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

With time, the feeling of his plays became ever more apparent. The breakthrough likely came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to reproduction. It raises a whole host of questions such as whether any social obligation is the result of personal instability and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute realization of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and free will, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly moving. Ideas and emotion perfectly come together in a scene where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past civilizations to which her instructor responds: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the classical physics survives her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was infrequently questioned. What was contested, especially in the early years, were his reservations about the power of art: something he regularly discussed in conversations. “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 qualms about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a running commentary on wealth, marriage, morals, social class, the fall of the nobility and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a number of works that engage to powerful results with the misuse of human rights by dictatorial systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly pronounced crazy and confined in a chamber with an real psychiatric patient who thinks he is in command of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the whole orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard exposing the cruel illogicalities of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with wit and rigidity with a