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Every one of the finest playwrights extend the limits of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their distinct way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric subjects – ranging from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the puzzle of consciousness – and transform them into clever, inventive and regularly touching theatrical works. The stage, the actor Olivier once said, is a great glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Encounter

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly because of a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a mini-speech on two radio plays by a at that time little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer racked 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 voice of the time. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained perfectly courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the workings of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances causing our demise. 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 stillness, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The typical combination of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a major ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules followed an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the focus of a speech being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was clutching a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became ever more evident. The breakthrough likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It poses a plethora of questions such as whether any civic duty is the result of private derangement and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense consciousness of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and volition, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, functions because it is intensely emotional. Thoughts and sentiment flawlessly coincide in a segment where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past civilisations to which her teacher replies: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the classical physics survives her sadly abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was rarely questioned. What was discussed, particularly in the beginning, were his reservations about the efficacy of drama: something he frequently explored in interviews. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a running commentary on money, matrimony, ethics, status, the fall of the upper class and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a collection of works that grapple to significant impact with the misuse of civil liberties by authoritarian systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Soviet critic incorrectly pronounced insane and imprisoned in a room with an real lunatic who thinks he is in charge of an symphony. It was startling both to see the full orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the harsh ridiculousness of communist repression with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with irony and inflexibility with a