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All the finest dramatists push the limits of drama. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their unique fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly esoteric topics – ranging from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the puzzle of consciousness – and turn them into clever, inventive and often touching dramas. Drama, Laurence Olivier noted, is a significant glamorizer of ideas. Stoppard affirmed that with his ability to make ideas dance.

Initial Introduction

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely because of a man named Philip French, who, besides being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he requested that I to present a mini-speech on two radio plays by a then little-known writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer accumulated an ever escalating taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to get in touch with his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had gone on television in 1968 and given a sniffy opening night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he stayed exceptionally polite. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the ways of our world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we in time 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 constructing a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings indicate that it is about how we are all victims of chance circumstances leading to our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the stillness, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The typical fusion of intellectual audacity and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a big moral issue: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether ethical rules followed an absolute, God-given law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the topic of a lecture being prepared by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the perils of a collapsing society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a former minister of agriculture had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also carefully studied. I remember, prior to Jumpers, meeting him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was gripping a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With the years, the sentiment of his plays became ever more evident. The key moment likely came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to reproduction. It raises a multitude of questions such as whether any civic duty is the result of personal instability and whether concepts such as fairness and patriotism exist outside our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened awareness of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and volition, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, succeeds because it is profoundly emotional. Ideas and sentiment perfectly coincide in a moment where a brilliant youth, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past cultures to which her instructor answers: “Scientific insights seen briefly and overlooked will have their renaissance.” And that is just what occurs, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the Newton's world endures beyond her tragically truncated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was rarely doubted. What was debated, especially in the early years, were his reservations about the power of theatre: something he often discussed in conversations. “I used to feel alone,” 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], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it addresses no major issues.”

I think he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a running commentary on money, wedlock, ethics, social class, the fall of the upper class and the dominance of trade. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a series of works that deal to powerful results with the abuse of individual freedoms by oppressive systems. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist wrongly declared insane and locked in a room with an authentic madman who imagines himself in charge of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the cruel absurdities of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I commented at the time, “force is met with wit and rigidity with a