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Every one of the finest dramatists extend the limits of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their unique way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized subjects – ranging from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the enigma of consciousness – and convert them into humorous, imaginative and regularly moving theatrical works. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a great glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Encounter

I was lucky enough to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely due to Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a short talk on two broadcast plays by a at that time obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer ran up an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a critical premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was exceptionally courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the workings of our world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated 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 recognise that Pinter was always a political playwright, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was commended for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all prey of random circumstances resulting in our demise. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the stillness, resisting the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The typical blend of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a big moral issue: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether principles adhered to an absolute, God-given law. Not your average theatrical topic, 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 realised that it was also about the pain of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs of the London Library where he was gripping a mound of books that rose 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 perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to reproduction. It asks a whole host of questions such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of private derangement and whether notions such as justice and patriotism exist independent of our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense consciousness of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and volition, classicism and Romanticism, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly emotional. Ideas and feeling seamlessly merge in a scene where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, laments the loss of past civilizations to which her tutor replies: “Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the Newton's world outlasts her tragically cut short life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was seldom doubted. What was contested, particularly in the early years, were his doubts about the efficacy 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 bad person if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work provides a running commentary on money, marriage, values, social class, the fall of the aristocracy and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a number of works that grapple to significant impact with the abuse of civil liberties by dictatorial systems. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident wrongly declared insane and imprisoned in a room with an genuine madman who imagines himself in charge of an orchestra. It was startling both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard exposing the brutal illogicalities of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I commented at the time, “force is met with wit and inflexibility with a