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All the finest dramatists push the limits of drama. Beckett and Pinter did it in their unique manner. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric subjects – ranging from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the mystery of the mind – and convert them into witty, imaginative and regularly emotional theatrical works. The stage, the actor Olivier remarked, is a significant glamorizer of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Early Introduction

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard early on. That was completely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a the BBC producer. In 1966 he requested that I to present a short talk on two radio plays by a back then unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an broke writer accumulated an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit 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 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 Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances leading to our demise. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the silence, beating back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic blend of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a big ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether principles obeyed an universal, God-given law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the subject of a talk being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was gripping a mound of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With time, the emotional content of his plays became more and more apparent. The key moment arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to revival. It raises a multitude of issues such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of personal instability and whether ideas such as justice and national pride exist outside our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened consciousness of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and free will, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is deeply touching. Thoughts and sentiment seamlessly coincide in a segment where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past cultures to which her teacher responds: “Scientific insights caught sight of and forgotten will have their moment.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the Newton's world endures beyond her tragically truncated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was rarely doubted. What was contested, particularly in the early years, were his reservations about the power of drama: something he frequently discussed 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 Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a running commentary on wealth, marriage, morals, status, the weakening of the upper class and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a series of works that engage to great effect with the violation of human rights by oppressive systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident wrongly diagnosed crazy and confined in a chamber with an authentic lunatic who imagines himself in control of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the whole LSO on the stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the brutal illogicalities of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and strictness with a