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Every one of the great playwrights broaden the frontiers of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their distinct fashion. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently obscure subjects – from the science of chaos to moral philosophy and the puzzle of the mind – and turn them into humorous, imaginative and frequently touching dramas. Drama, the actor Olivier once said, is a great embellisher of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his talent to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Discovery

I had the good fortune to come across Stoppard early on. That was entirely because of a man named Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to give a short talk on two radio plays by a at that time obscure writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer accumulated an skyrocketing taxi bill. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the voice of the time. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and got to meet their young author.

It is telling for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a dismissive premiere review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he stayed perfectly courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the nature of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Substance

From the start, Stoppard was praised as an mental athlete: a man who was propelled by thoughts as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we finally came to see that there was an undercurrent of feeling to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was praised for its cleverness in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances leading to our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the stillness, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The characteristic blend of daring ideas and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that posed a significant moral issue: whether societal ethics was a conditioned response to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an universal, God-given law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the subject of a talk being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one watched the play, the more one grasped that it was also about the pain of a failing 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 Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Preparation and Emotional Breakthrough

Stoppard’s success – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were open to plays about complex ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, prior to Jumpers, running into him on the entrance of the London Library where he was clutching a stack of books that rose to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he responded.

With time, the feeling of his plays became ever more visible. The breakthrough perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which holds up better than most of his plays to reproduction. It poses a whole host of queries such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of individual madness and whether ideas such as justice and patriotism exist independent of our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a intense awareness of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with predestination and free will, classical ideals and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is profoundly moving. Ideas and emotion seamlessly merge in a segment where a brilliant teenager, Thomasina, bemoans the demise of past civilisations to which her instructor responds: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and lost to view will have their time again.” And that is exactly what transpires, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the classical physics outlasts her tragically cut short life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was infrequently doubted. What was discussed, especially in the initial period, were his doubts about the power 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 Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no compunction about that. To refer obliquely to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is important but it avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since Wilde’s play provides a continuous critique on finance, matrimony, ethics, social class, the weakening of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own argument by writing a collection of works that deal to significant impact with the violation of human rights by dictatorial governments. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident falsely diagnosed crazy and locked in a room with an genuine madman who thinks he is in command of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the full orchestra on the stage and to witness Stoppard revealing the harsh absurdities of Russian tyranny with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and strictness with a