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All the finest dramatists broaden the limits of theatre. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their unique manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure subjects – ranging from chaos theory to ethical thought and the puzzle of awareness – and turn them into witty, imaginative and frequently moving plays. Drama, Laurence Olivier noted, is a great glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to bring concepts to life.

Early Introduction

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly due to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to give a short talk on two radio plays by a back then little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer accumulated an skyrocketing taxi-fare. 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 captivated by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he was exceptionally gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the workings of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by concepts as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive fusion of intellectual audacity and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a major moral issue: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules obeyed an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the focus of a talk being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the pain of a broken marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the London Library where he was gripping a mound of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly apparent. The breakthrough perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to revival. It asks a plethora of issues such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of personal instability and whether notions such as justice and patriotism exist outside our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened awareness of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and volition, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is deeply moving. Ideas and emotion flawlessly come together in a moment where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past civilizations to which her instructor replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the Newtonian universe survives her unfortunately truncated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was seldom questioned. What was discussed, notably in the initial period, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of art: something he regularly explored in discussions. “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 social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a ongoing observation on wealth, matrimony, values, social class, the decline of the aristocracy and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own position by writing a series of works that engage to powerful results with the abuse of human rights by dictatorial regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist falsely pronounced insane and locked in a cell with an genuine lunatic who thinks he is in command of an symphony. It was startling both to see the whole LSO on stage and to witness Stoppard unmasking the brutal ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with dark humour. As I wrote at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and strictness with a