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Every one of the finest playwrights broaden the limits of drama. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter succeeded in their own way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric subjects – ranging from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the puzzle of the mind – and convert them into witty, creative and frequently moving plays. Drama, Laurence Olivier noted, is a powerful embellisher of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Encounter

Fortunately for me to discover Stoppard at an early stage. That was wholly due to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a BBC programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a mini-speech on two radio plays by a back then unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer ran up an skyrocketing cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to contact his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and eventually met their youthful author.

It says much for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a critical first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed exceptionally courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he understood the nature of our world.

Intellectual Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by personality and plot. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its brilliance in creating a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances resulting in our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had acted 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 stillness, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so touching and even heartbreaking.”

The distinctive blend of daring ideas and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a major ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a conditioned response to history or whether principles followed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your usual dramatic theme, but here the subject of a talk being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the anguish of a fractured marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a previous minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Thorough Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the steps of the London Library where he was gripping a mound of books that reached up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With the years, the feeling of his plays became more and more apparent. The key moment likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than any of his plays to reproduction. It poses a plethora of questions such as whether any civic duty is the outcome of personal instability and whether ideas such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our views of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a intense realization of the ecstasy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses determinism and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is intensely moving. Thoughts and emotion seamlessly come together in a segment where a exceptional teenager, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past civilizations to which her instructor answers: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe outlasts her sadly cut short life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was infrequently challenged. What was debated, notably in the initial period, were his doubts about the effectiveness of drama: something he often talked about in discussions. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it addresses no major issues.”

I feel he was totally wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a continuous critique on finance, matrimony, morals, status, the fall of the upper class and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a number of works that engage to powerful results with the violation of civil liberties by authoritarian regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic incorrectly declared insane and confined in a chamber with an real lunatic who believes himself in control of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the entire orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the cruel ridiculousness of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I wrote at the time, “iron is met with wit and inflexibility with a