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Every one of the outstanding dramatists extend the limits of drama. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their distinct way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure themes – from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the mystery of the mind – and transform them into humorous, imaginative and frequently moving theatrical works. Drama, Laurence Olivier noted, is a powerful glamorizer of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Encounter

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely thanks to Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a then obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, 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 speaking clock. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained exceptionally polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the workings of our world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was acclaimed for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances causing our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the silence, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic fusion of daring ideas and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that raised a significant philosophical question: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the topic of a talk being prepared 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 pain of a failing marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the London Library where he was gripping a pile of books that reached up 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 likely came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It asks a plethora of questions such as whether any civic duty is the consequence of individual madness and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist beyond our perceptions of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and choice, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is intensely emotional. Thoughts and sentiment seamlessly come together in a segment where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past civilizations to which her tutor responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the classical physics outlasts her sadly cut short life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was rarely questioned. What was discussed, especially in the early years, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of drama: something he regularly explored in discussions. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde provides a running commentary on money, wedlock, ethics, class, the fall of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own point by writing a collection of works that deal to significant impact with the violation of human rights by dictatorial regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident falsely diagnosed crazy and confined in a room with an real lunatic who believes himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the whole orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard revealing the brutal absurdities of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with irony and inflexibility with a