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All the great dramatists push the limits of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their distinct fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric themes – from chaos theory to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of consciousness – and convert them into witty, creative and frequently moving dramas. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier once said, is a significant glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Introduction

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely thanks to Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a short talk on two radio plays by a then obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer accumulated an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was impressed by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed impeccably gracious. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the nature of our world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by individuals and narrative. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the stillness, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive fusion of conceptual boldness and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a significant ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules followed an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the subject of a talk being developed by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were open to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the London Library where he was gripping a stack of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became ever more visible. The key moment likely came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It raises a multitude of issues such as whether any civic duty is the result of individual madness and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened realization of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and choice, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a host of other things, functions because it is profoundly moving. Ideas and feeling perfectly merge in a segment where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past civilizations to which her instructor replies: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was infrequently challenged. What was discussed, notably in the beginning, were his skepticism about the power 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 jerk if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a ongoing observation on finance, marriage, ethics, status, the fall of the upper class and the rise of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a collection of works that grapple to powerful results with the abuse of civil liberties by dictatorial governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident wrongly declared mad and imprisoned in a chamber with an authentic lunatic who thinks he is in control of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the brutal ridiculousness of communist repression with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a