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Every one of the finest dramatists push the limits of theatre. Beckett and Pinter did it in their distinct fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure topics – from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the mystery of the mind – and turn them into witty, inventive and frequently emotional theatrical works. Theatre, the actor Olivier once said, is a powerful glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Introduction

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly due to Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a mini-speech on two radio plays by a at that time little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer racked up an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained impeccably polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he grasped the nature of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was praised as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by concepts as much as by character and plot. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances causing our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the stillness, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The distinctive blend of daring ideas and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a big philosophical question: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your typical subject for a play, but here the focus of a talk being developed by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was holding a pile of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the passage of time, the sentiment of his plays became more and more apparent. The key moment likely came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than any of his plays to revival. It raises a multitude of questions such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of private derangement and whether concepts such as fairness and national pride exist beyond our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute awareness of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and free will, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly touching. Ideas and emotion flawlessly coincide in a moment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past civilisations to which her instructor responds: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is exactly what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the classical physics endures beyond her unfortunately truncated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a playwright was rarely challenged. What was contested, particularly in the initial period, were his reservations about the efficacy of drama: something he frequently talked about in conversations. “I used to feel out on a limb,” 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 compunction about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a continuous critique on money, matrimony, ethics, class, the decline of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a series of works that grapple to great effect with the violation of human rights by oppressive systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident incorrectly pronounced mad and confined in a chamber with an real madman who imagines himself in charge of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the harsh ridiculousness of communist repression with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “force is met with wit and rigidity with a