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Every one of the finest playwrights push the frontiers of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their own way. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized topics – ranging from the science of chaos to ethical thought and the mystery of consciousness – and convert them into humorous, imaginative and often touching dramas. Theatre, Laurence Olivier remarked, is a significant glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Encounter

I had the good fortune to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was completely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a short talk on two audio dramas by a at that time unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer ran up an ever escalating taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to contact his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive opening night review of The 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 ways of our world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by character and narrative. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was praised for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances causing our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the quiet, pushing back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic blend of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a major philosophical question: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your typical dramatic theme, but here the topic of a talk being developed 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 pain of a fractured marriage and the risks of a unraveling society in which astronauts were brawling on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was holding a pile of books that rose 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 visible. The turning point perhaps came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to reproduction. It raises a plethora of issues such as whether any civic duty is the result of personal instability and whether concepts such as fairness and national pride exist outside our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened realization of the joy of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses predestination and choice, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, functions because it is intensely emotional. Thoughts and sentiment flawlessly come together in a scene where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the loss of past cultures to which her teacher answers: “Mathematical discoveries seen briefly and overlooked will have their time again.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the classical physics outlasts her tragically abbreviated life.

Debating the Efficacy of Theatre

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was infrequently challenged. What was debated, particularly in the early years, were his skepticism about the efficacy of art: something he regularly talked about in conversations. “I used to feel isolated,” 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 refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a running commentary on money, matrimony, ethics, social class, the weakening of the aristocracy and the rise of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a number of works that grapple to powerful results with the misuse of civil liberties by oppressive governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Russian dissident falsely pronounced mad and confined in a room with an genuine madman who imagines himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was shocking both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard exposing the harsh illogicalities of Russian tyranny with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a