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Every one of the finest playwrights broaden the limits of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their distinct way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized topics – from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the puzzle of awareness – and turn them into clever, creative and regularly moving dramas. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a significant glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Early Encounter

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was completely due to Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to give a brief lecture on two audio dramas by a back then little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer accumulated an constantly rising taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical 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 knew the ways of our world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances causing our end. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the silence, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The typical combination of daring ideas and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a significant moral issue: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles followed an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the subject of a talk being written by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was gripping a stack of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With time, the emotional content of his plays became more and more evident. The turning point likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to revival. It raises a plethora of queries such as whether any public commitment is the result of individual madness and whether concepts such as justice and national pride exist beyond our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute awareness of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and volition, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, works because it is profoundly emotional. Ideas and sentiment seamlessly merge in a scene where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past cultures to which her instructor replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the classical physics endures beyond her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was seldom challenged. What was discussed, especially in the beginning, were his doubts about the effectiveness of theatre: something he frequently explored in interviews. “I used to feel alone,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a continuous critique on wealth, matrimony, values, social class, the decline of the aristocracy and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a number of works that engage to significant impact with the abuse of individual freedoms by authoritarian systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident incorrectly diagnosed crazy and locked in a room with an genuine psychiatric patient who believes himself in control of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the cruel ridiculousness of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a