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Every one of the great dramatists extend the limits of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their distinct way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized themes – ranging from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the mystery of awareness – and turn them into witty, inventive and frequently touching theatrical works. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a powerful embellisher of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Early Introduction

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard early on. That was entirely because of a man named Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he invited me to give a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a at that time unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer racked up an ever escalating taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was exceptionally polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the nature of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Emotional Depth

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances leading to our end. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language 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 heartbreaking.”

The typical combination of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a significant ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an universal, God-given law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the subject of a talk being written 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 risks of a collapsing society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs of the London Library where he was clutching a stack of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became ever more visible. The breakthrough arguably came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to revival. It poses a multitude of issues such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of personal instability and whether ideas such as fairness and national pride exist beyond our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened consciousness of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and free will, classicism and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is intensely emotional. Thoughts and emotion seamlessly coincide in a segment where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past civilizations to which her teacher responds: “Scientific insights caught sight of and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the Newton's world endures beyond her sadly cut short life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was infrequently challenged. What was debated, notably in the beginning, were his reservations about the effectiveness of drama: something he regularly talked about in interviews. “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 Vietnam or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a ongoing observation on finance, marriage, morals, status, the decline of the nobility and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a number of works that engage to powerful results with the violation of civil liberties by oppressive regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident falsely declared insane and confined in a room with an genuine lunatic who imagines himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the whole LSO on the stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the brutal ridiculousness of communist repression with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with irony and strictness with a