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Every one of the great playwrights push the limits of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their unique manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized topics – from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the puzzle of consciousness – and convert them into humorous, creative and regularly touching dramas. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a significant glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Early Encounter

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely because of a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a then unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer accumulated an ever escalating taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed impeccably gracious. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the nature of our world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by character and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances causing our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue 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 typical combination of intellectual audacity and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that posed a significant ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether principles adhered to an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the focus of a talk being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were receptive to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, shortly 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 answered.

With the passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became more and more visible. The breakthrough likely came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to restaging. It raises a multitude of questions such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of individual madness and whether notions such as justice and patriotism exist outside our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and free will, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, works because it is profoundly moving. Ideas and feeling seamlessly coincide in a segment where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past civilisations to which her teacher answers: “Scientific insights glimpsed and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the classical physics outlasts her unfortunately cut short life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was rarely doubted. What was discussed, notably in the initial period, were his skepticism about the power of drama: something he often explored 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 social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a continuous critique on money, wedlock, ethics, class, the decline of the nobility and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a collection of works that deal to significant impact with the misuse of civil liberties by oppressive regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident falsely declared insane and locked in a room with an authentic lunatic who thinks he is in control of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the full orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the brutal ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with irony and inflexibility with a