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All the outstanding dramatists extend the limits of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter did it in their distinct fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric themes – ranging from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of the mind – and convert them into witty, creative and regularly emotional plays. The stage, the actor Olivier noted, is a great embellisher of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Initial Encounter

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard early on. That was completely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a then little-known writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer accumulated an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the cleverness of both plays and eventually met their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was impeccably courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the ways of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by individuals and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, 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 cleverness in crafting a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances leading to our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the silence, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive combination of daring ideas and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a major philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions adhered to an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the topic of a speech being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with playwright 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 entrance of the a library in London where he was holding a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became more and more visible. The breakthrough likely came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to restaging. It poses a multitude of questions such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of individual madness and whether ideas such as justice and patriotism exist outside our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute realization of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, works because it is intensely emotional. Ideas and sentiment seamlessly coincide in a moment where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past civilizations to which her tutor replies: “Scientific insights seen briefly and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her tragically truncated life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was rarely questioned. What was debated, especially in the early years, were his reservations about the efficacy of theatre: something he regularly discussed in conversations. “I used to feel out on a limb,” 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 meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a ongoing observation on money, marriage, ethics, social class, the decline of the upper class and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a collection of works that deal to great effect with the abuse of civil liberties by oppressive regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly diagnosed insane and imprisoned in a chamber with an genuine lunatic who believes himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the whole LSO on stage and to see Stoppard exposing the harsh absurdities of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a