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Every one of the finest playwrights broaden the limits of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their unique way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized topics – ranging from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the mystery of the mind – and transform them into humorous, imaginative and often emotional dramas. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a powerful glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Encounter

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard early on. That was completely due to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a at that time obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer accumulated an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace 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 remained impeccably courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the workings of our world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances leading to our demise. I remember 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 beating back the quiet, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive combination of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a big moral issue: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions followed an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the focus of a talk being developed by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the London Library where he was gripping a stack of books that reached 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 apparent. The turning point perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to revival. It asks a whole host of queries such as whether any civic duty is the result of individual madness and whether notions such as justice and national pride exist independent of our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute realization of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and choice, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is intensely moving. Thoughts and feeling seamlessly merge in a moment where a gifted teenager, Thomasina, laments the loss of past civilizations to which her teacher replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the Newton's world outlasts her unfortunately cut short life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was rarely doubted. What was discussed, particularly in the initial period, were his reservations about the effectiveness of drama: something he frequently explored in discussions. “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 compunction about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a continuous critique on finance, marriage, values, status, the fall of the upper class and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a series of works that deal to powerful results with the misuse of civil liberties by dictatorial systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly pronounced mad and locked in a chamber with an genuine madman who thinks he is in control of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the brutal absurdities of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a