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Every one of the finest playwrights extend the limits of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their distinct manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure topics – ranging from chaos theory to ethical thought and the puzzle of awareness – and transform them into humorous, imaginative and regularly moving dramas. Drama, Laurence Olivier once said, is a significant glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Initial Introduction

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard early on. That was entirely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he invited me to deliver a short talk on two audio dramas by a at that time obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer racked up an constantly rising taxi-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 cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained perfectly courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the nature of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the quiet, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic combination of intellectual audacity and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that raised a big moral issue: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether principles obeyed an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the focus of a lecture being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance 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 the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became ever more evident. The breakthrough likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It asks a whole host of issues such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of personal instability and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist outside our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a heightened awareness of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores predestination and free will, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, works because it is intensely moving. Ideas and emotion flawlessly come together in a segment where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past cultures to which her teacher responds: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary rethinking of the Newtonian universe survives her unfortunately truncated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was infrequently challenged. What was contested, especially in the early years, were his doubts about the effectiveness of art: something he regularly discussed in interviews. “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 housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a continuous critique on finance, marriage, values, class, the decline of the aristocracy and the rise of business. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a number of works that deal to significant impact with the abuse of individual freedoms by authoritarian governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic falsely diagnosed crazy and confined in a cell with an authentic psychiatric patient who believes himself in control of an symphony. It was startling both to see the entire orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the brutal absurdities of communist repression with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “force is met with wit and inflexibility with a