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All the outstanding playwrights push the limits of drama. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their unique manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized themes – ranging from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the mystery of awareness – and convert them into witty, creative and often touching plays. The stage, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a significant glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Encounter

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was completely because of a man named Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a then unknown writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer racked up an skyrocketing cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained exceptionally courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the workings of our world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its cleverness in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all prey of chance circumstances resulting in our end. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the quiet, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive fusion of conceptual boldness and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a major philosophical question: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether principles obeyed an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the subject of a speech 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 anguish of a fractured marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the steps 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 replied.

With time, the feeling of his plays became more and more visible. The breakthrough arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to revival. It raises a plethora of issues such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of personal instability and whether concepts such as justice and patriotism exist outside our understanding of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened realization of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, works because it is deeply moving. Thoughts and emotion flawlessly come together in a moment where a gifted youth, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past cultures to which her teacher answers: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the classical physics endures beyond her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was infrequently challenged. What was contested, particularly in the beginning, were his skepticism about the efficacy of art: something he frequently 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 the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it says nothing about anything.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a ongoing observation on wealth, matrimony, values, social class, the decline of the nobility and the rise of business. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a series of works that engage to great effect with the misuse of individual freedoms by authoritarian systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly declared crazy and locked in a room with an authentic madman who believes himself in control of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the entire LSO on the stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the harsh ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “force is met with wit and strictness with a