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All the great dramatists extend the limits of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter achieved this in their own fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure topics – from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the puzzle of consciousness – and transform them into humorous, inventive and often emotional theatrical works. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a powerful glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Encounter

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was wholly because of a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a at that time unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer accumulated an skyrocketing cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was perfectly courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the workings of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by character and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised 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 extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the quiet, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The typical fusion of conceptual boldness and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a big philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles obeyed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the topic of a lecture being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a fractured marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the steps of the London Library where he was holding a mound of books that rose 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 evident. The key moment perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to restaging. It poses a plethora of questions such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of personal instability and whether notions such as justice and patriotism exist beyond our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened consciousness of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and free will, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly touching. Concepts and sentiment seamlessly come together in a moment where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, laments the demise of past civilizations to which her instructor replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs glimpsed and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is exactly 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 dramatist was rarely challenged. What was debated, especially in the beginning, were his doubts about the power of art: something he regularly talked about in discussions. “I used to feel out on a limb,” 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 compunction about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a continuous critique on money, matrimony, ethics, class, the weakening of the upper class and the rise of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a number of works that grapple to significant impact with the abuse of civil liberties by authoritarian regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident incorrectly declared mad and imprisoned in a room with an authentic psychiatric patient who thinks he is in charge 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 absurdities of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a