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All the finest dramatists extend the boundaries of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their own way. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure themes – ranging from chaotic systems to philosophical ethics and the enigma of the mind – and transform them into clever, imaginative and frequently emotional dramas. Theatre, Laurence Olivier once said, is a great embellisher of thought. Stoppard demonstrated that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Introduction

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely because of a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a mini-speech on two audio dramas by a at that time unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer racked up an skyrocketing cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the speaking clock. I was impressed by the cleverness of both plays and had the chance to meet their emerging author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was impeccably polite. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he understood the nature of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Gymnast and Heartfelt Substance

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was motivated by thoughts as much as by personality and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to understand that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its ingenuity in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings suggest that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the language is all. The word is beating back the silence, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even tragic.”

The distinctive blend of intellectual audacity and heartfelt depth was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a big moral issue: whether social morality was a instilled reaction to history or whether principles followed an universal, heaven-sent law. Not your typical theatrical topic, but here the focus of a lecture being written by the play’s protagonist, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the anguish of a failing marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which space travelers were fighting on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also meticulously investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the London Library where he was holding a pile of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With time, the emotional content of his plays became more and more evident. The breakthrough likely came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to reproduction. It poses a plethora of queries such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of individual madness and whether ideas such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense awareness of the joy of love and the torment of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and free will, classicism and Romanticism, and a myriad of other things, works because it is intensely emotional. Concepts and sentiment seamlessly come together in a segment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, laments the demise of past cultures to which her tutor responds: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and lost to view will have their moment.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe survives her sadly cut short life.

Debating the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s brilliance as a dramatist was rarely challenged. What was debated, notably in the early years, were his reservations about the effectiveness of drama: something he frequently explored 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 housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a running commentary on money, marriage, ethics, social class, the decline of the upper class and the ascendancy of business. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a number of works that deal to powerful results with the misuse of civil liberties by oppressive systems. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first staged at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Soviet critic incorrectly diagnosed crazy and imprisoned in a chamber with an authentic madman who thinks he is in charge of an musical ensemble. It was startling both to see the entire orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard revealing the harsh illogicalities of Soviet oppression with grim wit. As I noted at the time, “force is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a