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All the great dramatists extend the limits of drama. Beckett and Pinter succeeded in their distinct manner. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized subjects – from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the enigma of awareness – and transform them into humorous, inventive and regularly emotional plays. Drama, the actor Olivier remarked, is a great glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard confirmed that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Discovery

Fortunately for me to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was completely thanks to Philip French, who, in addition to being a film critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a brief lecture on two radio plays by a at that time unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an destitute writer ran up an skyrocketing cab fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the time announcement service. I was captivated by the ingenuity 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 sniffy first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was impeccably courteous. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the nature of our world.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Depth

From the beginning, Stoppard was celebrated as an cerebral acrobat: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by character and plot. But, just as we later came to understand that Pinter was always a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its cleverness in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again indicate that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances causing our end. I remember John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, saying to me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the silence, beating back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic combination of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also evident in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that asked a big ethical dilemma: whether public morals was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions followed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the subject of a talk 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 anguish of a fractured marriage and the dangers of a unraveling society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Research and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that audiences were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the stairs of the London Library where he was gripping a stack of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With the passage of time, the emotional content of his plays became increasingly evident. The turning point perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than most of his plays to reproduction. It asks a whole host of queries such as whether any civic duty is the result of private derangement and whether notions such as fairness and patriotism exist independent of our views of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a acute awareness of the bliss of love and the agony of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with fatalism and volition, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is intensely touching. Thoughts and emotion flawlessly merge in a moment where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, mourns the demise of past civilizations to which her instructor answers: “Intellectual breakthroughs caught sight of and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is just what transpires, in that Thomasina’s innovative rethinking of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her tragically truncated life.

Debating the Power of Art

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was infrequently doubted. What was discussed, particularly in the early years, were his reservations about the power of art: something he regularly discussed in conversations. “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 allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it addresses no major issues.”

I believe he was entirely wrong about that since the play by Wilde offers a continuous critique on money, matrimony, morals, status, the weakening of the aristocracy and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own position by writing a number of works that deal to great effect with the violation of human rights by oppressive regimes. One of the most stunning was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It depicted a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly declared insane and imprisoned in a chamber with an real madman who believes himself in charge of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the entire London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard unmasking the brutal illogicalities of Soviet oppression with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “iron is met with wit and inflexibility with a