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All the great playwrights extend the limits of drama. Beckett and Pinter did it in their distinct manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized topics – from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the mystery of consciousness – and turn them into clever, inventive and regularly moving plays. Drama, Laurence Olivier noted, is a great glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to make ideas dance.

Initial Introduction

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard early on. That was completely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to give a mini-speech on two broadcast plays by a back then obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer ran up an skyrocketing cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their emerging author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he stayed exceptionally polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the ways of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the stillness, resisting the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The distinctive fusion of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a big moral issue: whether public morals was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions followed an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your usual theatrical topic, but here the subject of a talk being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one realised that it was also about the anguish of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a disintegrating 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 Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, meeting him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was holding a mound of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With time, the feeling of his plays became ever more evident. The turning point likely came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to reproduction. It asks a multitude of queries such as whether any public commitment is the consequence of private derangement and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our views of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute awareness of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores fatalism and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, works because it is deeply moving. Thoughts and sentiment seamlessly coincide in a scene where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, laments the demise of past civilizations to which her teacher replies: “Scientific insights seen briefly and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of the classical physics endures beyond her sadly abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was rarely questioned. What was contested, particularly in the early years, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of art: something he frequently talked about in discussions. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a ongoing observation on wealth, wedlock, ethics, social class, the weakening of the aristocracy and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own point by writing a series of works that grapple to significant impact with the abuse of individual freedoms by oppressive regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident wrongly declared crazy and confined in a cell with an real madman who imagines himself in control of an symphony. It was startling both to see the whole orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the brutal illogicalities of Soviet oppression with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a