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Every one of the outstanding dramatists broaden the limits of theatre. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their distinct way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric subjects – ranging from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the enigma of awareness – and turn them into witty, imaginative and regularly moving dramas. The stage, Laurence Olivier noted, is a significant glamorizer of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Early Discovery

I had the good fortune to discover Stoppard early on. That was wholly due to Philip French, who, besides 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 then obscure writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer racked up an skyrocketing cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus driver tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the creativity of both plays and got to meet their youthful author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive first-night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he was impeccably courteous. But one thing people forget about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he understood the nature of the journalistic world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was hailed as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was motivated by ideas as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we later came to recognise that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances resulting in our end. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is pushing back the stillness, resisting the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The typical blend of intellectual audacity and feeling was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a significant ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an absolute, heaven-sent law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the focus of a talk being developed by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a ex- minister of agriculture had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also meticulously researched. I remember, prior to Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was gripping a mound of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the years, the emotional content of his plays became ever more visible. The breakthrough likely came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to restaging. It raises a whole host of issues such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of individual madness and whether ideas such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our understanding of them. But underlying this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a heightened consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a multitude of other things, works because it is profoundly emotional. Thoughts and emotion seamlessly come together in a segment where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past civilizations to which her instructor responds: “Scientific insights glimpsed and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is just what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative revision of the Newtonian universe survives her tragically truncated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was infrequently questioned. What was debated, especially in the beginning, were his doubts about the effectiveness of theatre: something he regularly talked about in discussions. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is important but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play offers a continuous critique on wealth, matrimony, morals, class, the decline of the aristocracy and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard undermined his own argument by writing a number of works that grapple to significant impact with the abuse of individual freedoms by oppressive regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic incorrectly declared crazy and imprisoned in a chamber with an genuine psychiatric patient who imagines himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the full orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard exposing the brutal illogicalities of communist repression with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “iron is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a