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Every one of the finest playwrights extend the boundaries of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter did it in their own manner. The feat of Tom Stoppard was to take apparently esoteric topics – ranging from the science of chaos to philosophical ethics and the enigma of the mind – and transform them into humorous, imaginative and often touching plays. Drama, Sir Laurence Olivier noted, is a great embellisher of thought. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Early Encounter

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard in his early career. That was entirely because of Philip French, who, besides being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a brief lecture on two radio plays by a at that time unknown writer described as Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an impoverished writer ran up an ever escalating taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to reach his wife who was the voice of the time. I was captivated by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their youthful author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s generosity of spirit that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I now love – he remained impeccably courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he grasped the nature of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Heartfelt Depth

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was driven by ideas as much as by personality and narrative. But, just as we eventually came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political dramatist, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s brainy concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its ingenuity in creating a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of arbitrary circumstances leading to our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had acted Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is pushing back the silence, beating back the obscurity … I think this is what makes his plays so moving and even heartbreaking.”

The typical blend of intellectual audacity and emotional substance was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 popular play, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that raised a major philosophical question: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an unchanging, God-given law. Not your average theatrical topic, but here the focus of a talk 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 suffering of a failing marriage and the perils of a unraveling society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Emotional Breakthrough

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

With the passage of time, the feeling of his plays became ever more apparent. The key moment likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It raises a multitude of queries such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of private derangement and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a heightened consciousness of the bliss of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and choice, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a host of other things, succeeds because it is deeply touching. Concepts and sentiment flawlessly merge in a segment where a gifted young girl, Thomasina, laments the disappearance of past civilizations to which her tutor replies: “Intellectual breakthroughs seen briefly and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is precisely what transpires, in that Thomasina’s revolutionary revision of the Newtonian universe endures beyond her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Debating the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was seldom challenged. What was contested, particularly in the beginning, were his doubts about the power of theatre: something he often explored in discussions. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work presents a continuous critique on finance, matrimony, ethics, class, the weakening of the upper class and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard weakened his own argument by writing a number of works that deal to great effect with the violation of individual freedoms by oppressive regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Eastern Bloc activist incorrectly declared mad and locked in a cell with an authentic madman who thinks he is in charge of an symphony. It was astonishing both to see the entire orchestra on the stage and to see Stoppard exposing the brutal absurdities of communist repression with black comedy. As I commented at the time, “brutality is met with wit and strictness with a