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Every one of the outstanding playwrights extend the limits of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their own fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure themes – ranging from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the enigma of consciousness – and convert them into witty, creative and regularly moving dramas. Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a great glamoriser of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Early Discovery

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard early on. That was entirely due to Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a BBC producer. In 1966 he invited me to give a short talk on two broadcast plays by a then little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer accumulated an skyrocketing taxi-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 captivated by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was exceptionally polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the workings of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the start, Stoppard was hailed as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we eventually came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances leading to our demise. I remember John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the quiet, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The typical combination 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 big philosophical question: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether principles adhered to an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the focus of a speech being developed 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 suffering of a failing marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which astronauts were scrapping on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was clutching a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With time, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly apparent. The breakthrough likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than any of his plays to restaging. It asks a whole host of queries such as whether any public commitment is the outcome of personal instability and whether concepts such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense awareness of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and volition, classicism and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is profoundly moving. Thoughts and emotion perfectly come together in a segment where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past civilizations to which her teacher replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and forgotten will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the Newtonian universe outlasts her unfortunately truncated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a playwright was infrequently doubted. What was contested, particularly in the initial period, were his skepticism about the power of theatre: something he regularly talked about in discussions. “I used to feel alone,” 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 addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a continuous critique on money, matrimony, morals, status, the fall of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a series of works that grapple to great effect with the violation of civil liberties by dictatorial regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly pronounced mad and confined in a chamber with an authentic lunatic who imagines himself in charge of an orchestra. It was shocking both to see the whole orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the harsh absurdities of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with irony and rigidity with a