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All the finest dramatists push the limits of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their own way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently specialized topics – ranging from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of the mind – and turn them into clever, creative and frequently touching dramas. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier remarked, is a significant embellisher of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Encounter

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard early on. That was entirely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a the BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a brief lecture on two broadcast plays by a back then unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer racked up an ever escalating cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet 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 sniffy first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained exceptionally polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the nature of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its ingenuity in constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all victims of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is resisting the quiet, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even tragic.”

The typical combination of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a significant ethical dilemma: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether principles followed an absolute, divinely inspired law. Not your usual subject for a play, but here the subject of a lecture being prepared by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the risks of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the a library in London where he was clutching a pile of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became increasingly apparent. The turning point likely came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It raises a plethora of queries such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of private derangement and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense awareness of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and free will, classicism and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, works because it is intensely emotional. Thoughts and feeling flawlessly merge in a moment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past civilizations to which her tutor answers: “Scientific insights glimpsed and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the classical physics outlasts her tragically abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was infrequently challenged. What was discussed, particularly in the initial period, were his reservations about the power of art: something he frequently discussed in conversations. “I used to feel alone,” 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 qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a ongoing observation on wealth, wedlock, values, status, the fall of the aristocracy and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a series of works that engage to powerful results with the misuse of individual freedoms by oppressive governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly pronounced crazy and confined in a cell with an authentic psychiatric patient who thinks he is in control of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard revealing the harsh ridiculousness of communist repression with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with irony and strictness with a