detail, one of the many threads of the play brought to a close at the end of major events. In Stoppard’s play it is of major significance, for it marks the death of the main characters. Stoppard’s play depicts the “offstage lives” of Hamlet’s boyhood friends, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and demonstrates how they might feel about being used as pawns who are ultimately executed with no understanding of the reason. As minor literary characters they of course have no lives apart from their roles inHamlet, and this lack allows Stoppard to use them as ideal representatives of modern absurdist-existentialist protagonists—empty, “flat” characters who are uncertain of their identity and their purpose and who thus speculate endlessly about what they should do next. Their only moments of sharp definition come when the characters from Hamlet sweep on stage, and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern briefly speak the lines and act the parts created for them by Shakespeare.

Meanwhile Hamlet, Gertrude, Claudius, and the other members of the court go about the serious business of Hamlet offstage, and “Ros” and “Guil,” as they are called in Stoppard’s work, are left to their own trivial devices, such as flipping coins, arguing with the players who put on the play-within-the-play, and alternately disagreeing and making up. Their behavior raises questions about actors and acting and about the nature of reality: Are these characters more “real” when engaged in the fictive role Shakespeare created for two actors to play or when existing “on their own” outside the context of his play? Ros, Guil, and the “Players” discuss the importance of blood, love, and rhetoric in a play and the question of role-playing as reality. Ros and Guil are controlled by the action of Shakespeare’s play; yet they remain under the illusion that they have choices to make and debate whether to go home or see how events transpire and whether to go to England with Hamlet. Inevitably, despite their fears and doubts and hesitations, they act as the moment demands, in accordance with the Shakespearean script.

This behavior by the main characters, many critics have pointed out, is heavily influenced by Samuel Beckett’s En attendant Godot (pb. 1952, pr. 1953; Waiting for Godot, 1954). Beckett’s play is also set in a “place without visible character,” as Stoppard describes it; features two somewhat pathetic figures waiting for some outside person to enter their lives and give them meaning; and explores issues of identity, fate, and probability. Stoppard clearly means for his audience to recognize and enjoy this parallel with Waiting for Godot and to allow the resonances of one work to inform the other. In Waiting for Godot, Gogo and Didi play word games to pass the time as they wait for Godot, who apparently will come and provide a purpose for their wait. In much the same way, Ros and Guil flip a coin endlessly as they wait for the characters of Hamlet to enter and give their lives purpose. Since Ros and Guil seem “modern,” the audience is led to consider what has happened to drama and philosophy in the period from Shakespeare’s time to their own. The confident, eloquent, and grand in Hamlet has become uncertain, banal, and trivial, with a concern not with heroes and kings but rather with trying to make sense of anything at all. Ros and Guil question whether anyone is watching them at all—even the fact of an audience is brought into doubt. Death is the only certainty. Because of its blend of absurdist humor, metaphysical inquiry, and literary allusion, the play’s literary and dramatic precursors are often identified as T. S. Eliot and Luigi Pirandello, writers who define modernist concerns.

More than one critic has pointed out that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is a long play in which almost nothing happens: The only real “action” is in the brief interruptions by members of the main play and when Ros and Guil board a ship to travel to England and to their deaths. Yet the play seems full of incident, with much coming and going, much speculation about location and time, and many time-consuming activities, such as the flipping of coins. As the first of what Stoppard calls his “high comedies of ideas,” this play, like Hamlet, raises questions about illusion and reality, about sanity and insanity, about what is relative and what is absolute. It has also been termed a highly intellectual comedy, yet rather surprisingly one that has enjoyed wide popular appeal in Great Britain, the United States, and beyond. As the work that made Stoppard’s reputation, it continues to be the object of anthologies and critiques.

Jumpers

First produced: 1972 (first published, 1972)

Type of work: Play

A retired music-hall singer married to a professor of moral philosophy is investigated for possibly shooting her husband’s rival at an acrobatic exhibition.

Jumpers hinges on the absurd but very amusing idea that the members of the faculty of philosophy at a major British university are also members of an amateur acrobatic team, the “jumpers” of the title. Sir Archibald, the vice chancellor, a “first-rate gymnast” himself, has packed his school with gymnastically talented thinkers, a combination admitted to be unique. Stoppard’s witty premise brings a dead metaphor to life through the “mental gymnastics” of Sir “Archie” and George, the professor of moral philosophy, as they argue and debate over philosophical principles and over Archie’s attentions to George’s wife Dotty, who is having an affair with her husband’s superior. George’s attention, however, is distracted by his need to prepare his side of a public debate with Duncan McFee, a rival philosopher who has enjoyed considerably more success than George. Dotty, whose state of mind seems to be just what her name implies, may have shot and killed McFee during an acrobatic exhibition in George and Dotty’s apartment. Inspector Bones, a detective, comes to investigate the murder, but he is so starstruck by Dotty, a retired music-hall singer, that he is easily distracted. The comedy results in part from conversations based on incorrect assumptions (Inspector Bones thinks George knows of McFee’s murder, but George does not) and from farcical interplay, as when Inspector Bones arrives with flowers for Dotty and is met by George, whose face is smeared with shaving cream and has a bow and arrow in hand.

The confusion does not end with the main characters; there is also a secretary who stripteases on a trapeze, a live tortoise, a dead hare, and two astronauts fighting on the moon. Yet Stoppard is able to bring a fair measure of order out of this chaos, and by the end of the play the audience has begun to accept the logic, or illogic, of this household. Stoppard makes little effort at suspending the audience’s disbelief, however, for his main interest is in the long declamations by George, who continually tests the logic of his arguments for the existence of God and the absoluteness of good and evil by rehearsing them aloud. These declamations allow Stoppard to include a recitation of the logical paradoxes of the Greek philosopher Zeno, who “proved” that an arrow released from a bow can never reach its target because it must first reach a midpoint in its flight, and before that the halfway point to the first midpoint, and so on in an infinite series of midpoints that can never be crossed. The focus on philosophical and logical cruxes such as these and on an ongoing debate between relativistic ethics and philosophical absolutes makes the play intellectually challenging even as the lunatic plot amuses.

Jumpers enjoyed less success than Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, with a number of reviewers complaining about the shallowness of the characters (little about Dotty is revealed, and the audience is not encouraged to care about George) and the superficiality of the plot (as in the earlier play, there are few “events” beyond what is described above). A just criticism is that the “jumpers” metaphor never really works. One reviewer notes that the practical problems of finding gymnasts who can act or actors who can jump led to a witty sideshow rather than to an integral element of the play, an integration of the sort that occurs with the Hamlet sections of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. Also, Hamlet brings with it its own credibility and seriousness, while George’s maunderings seem too often the self-indulgence of a tiresome old fool, which of course he is. Yet Jumpers also seems very much a play of its time, with its nudity, mocking of authority, and attempts to shock the audience with the outrageous. The late 1960’s and early 1970’s were a period of wild experimentation in the theater, and Stoppard’s effort seems in perfect accord with that sensibility.

Travesties

First produced: 1974 (first published, 1975)

Type of work: Play

Dadaist poet Tristan Tzara, James Joyce, and Vladimir Ilich Lenin become involved with one another and with the British consul in Zurich, Switzerland, in 1917.

Travesties concerns a number of possible travesties (or burlesques), including one by the playwright. First is the artistic philosophy of Tzara, who, like his fellow practitioners of Dada, tries to reverse all the bourgeois notions of the proper role of art and literature; Tzara “composes” a poem by cutting out all the words from a Shakespearean sonnet, putting them in a hat, and pulling them out at random. Another candidate for travesty status is Joyce, who, his genius as a writer notwithstanding, seems to have behaved in a spiteful and money-grubbing way toward someone he might well have thanked. Lenin’s travesty could well be his fleeing his scholarly pursuits in Zurich to lead a revolution that would end with the deaths of millions under Joseph Stalin. Henry Carr, the British consul in Zurich, gets involved in an undignified squabble with Joyce over some theater tickets and a pair of pants, and the case goes to court. The most likely travesty, however, may be the play itself, with Stoppard poking fun at his story, told from the point of view of an aged and confused Carr, about these unlikely characters coming together in Zurich, a conservative and conventional town. This travesty, then, would be Stoppard’s burlesque version of events, his focus on the grotesque in a story that is essentially true in its basic details.

Tzara, Joyce, and Lenin were all, in fact, residing in Zurich at about the same time and must have used the Zurich public library. Stoppard discovered that Joyce, on the lookout for a profit, produced an English-language version of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) and that Carr was persuaded to play the part of Algernon, with some success. Joyce and Carr had a dispute over some tickets that Carr had been given to sell and over Carr’s purchase of a pair of pants to wear as part of his costume. Joyce paid Carr only ten francs, “like a tip,” and the two found themselves in a Swiss court suing and countersuing, to the credit of neither. Tzara was moving in the same circles, while Lenin was using the library every day to research his book on imperialism and may well have been kept under surveillance by Carr. Stoppard interweaves these historical characters, with Tzara and Carr falling hilariously into the roles and language of The Importance of Being Earnest, as the poet pursues Gwendolen, here Joyce’s secretary, and Carr chases Cecily, now the Zurich librarian. Throughout, Lenin speaks lines Stoppard gleaned from his speeches and from various biographies and reminiscences about the Russian leader, lending a credible and serious tone to the manic romantic involvements of Carr and Joyce.

The situation allows Stoppard to compare and contrast three revolutionaries—in poetry, in the novel, and in politics—with the perhaps not surprising conclusion that there is little about which they can agree beyond the need for a revolt. Stoppard’s sympathies clearly lie with Joyce’s artistic practice, but he is careful to show Tzara and Lenin in sympathetic lights, allowing each to speak for himself and present his position. The related question of the proper role of art in society is explored directly or by implication in the varying philosophies of each character: Lenin’s utilitarian theory, which would later become socialist realism; Tzara’s goal of dumbfounding the bourgeois with perversity; and the complexities of Joyce’s self-referential psychology. Yet when the tone becomes too serious Stoppard regularly resorts to parody of The Importance of Being Earnest, deflating the high grandeur of his world-class revolutionaries. Art is for art’s sake and needs no utilitarian defense.

A final note on the staging may make Stoppard’s approach clearer. In the first production of Travesties, staged by the Royal Shakespeare Company at the Aldwych Theatre in London in 1974, Henry Carr, played by the immensely talented John Wood, was initially seated at an upright piano to one side of the stage. He represented the “old” Henry Carr, who was remembering his youth in Zurich and his odd associates in 1917, and the play that followed was his distorted reverie. Wood played the piano and sang musical comedy pieces, casting the entire evening as an eccentric entertainment by a possibly senile old man. To search for “truth” within such a framing device is clearly perilous, and Stoppard’s stage directions and other comments indicate that this stagy burlesque of the seriousness that follows is entirely his intention. He “squats” happily, as one commentator noted, on the fence between the popular and the academic, intriguing both sides but belonging to neither.

The Real Thing

First produced: 1982 (first published, 1982)

Type of work: Play

Henry, a middle-aged dramatist, leaves his wife and marries again, only to face his new wife’s infidelity with a younger man.

The Real Thing refers to true married love, a condition that Henry has to learn to preserve after divorcing his first wife. The play begins with a clever device, a scene between Max and Charlotte, who seem to be husband and wife. Charlotte has just returned from a business trip, and Max has discovered her infidelity. When he confronts her, she walks out on him. The reader then discovers that this scene is actually from a play, “House of Cards,” written by Henry, the main character of The Real Thing, who is in “real life” married to Charlotte. Henry is having an affair with Annie, Max’s real wife, so the situation of the play-within-the-play parallels that of the main play, although with a different cast of characters. When Henry leaves Charlotte and Annie leaves Max, Henry and Annie marry and are very much in love. The story jumps forward two years, when Annie is acting in a provincial theater in Glasgow and is tricked into having an affair; the play in which she is performing is John Ford’s ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore (1633). Henry, one of the “last romantics,” must avoid Max’s failure to keep his marriage intact but must also find some dignity and strength that will attract Annie, in spite of her guilt over committing adultery.

With this play Stoppard departs from his previous experiments in stagecraft and the avant-garde. There is no absurdist-existential empty stage, no acrobats swinging from chandeliers, no Dada poets, and no Russian revolutionaries. Instead, the audience sees the pain and suffering of a middle-aged man and his slightly younger second wife, characters who are mature, articulate, and highly sensitive to nuance. Both, in spite of their intelligence and skill with language, have made terminal mistakes in their first marriages; both have found “the real thing” in their second marriage but are unsure of how to hold on to it. Annie’s affair is not dismissed cynically by Annie, Henry, or Stoppard as the price of a civilized lifestyle in London; this is not the clever smart-set comedy of Noël Coward. Annie has betrayed her husband, and she and Henry must come to terms with that dishonesty. Yet Stoppard also shows the adultery as a human event for which it is difficult simply to condemn Annie, who has been somewhat neglected by her husband and who intended no harm (she says her lover “came in under the radar”). Henry also recognizes that the harmless flirtation of everyday life, and especially of life in the theater, can lead to irreversible involvement with one small push; it is almost rude not to notice such flirtation, he says.

What is interesting about the emotional and psychological subtleties of The Real Thing is that they are so new to Stoppard’s canon. His earlier plays were criticized as superficial, as comedies of ideas without involvement. In this play he is still exploring the existential moment and the need to create meaning and coherence but is doing so in domestic circumstances, in the interstices of everyday lives that all readers can recognize. There may be an autobiographical element in The Real Thing, as commentators have noted, since Stoppard was divorced and remarried, but more significantly he exhibits intense human sympathy for the pain of his characters, a sympathy absent and usually impossible in the contexts of his earlier plays.

Yet Stoppard’s intellectual concerns continue in The Real Thing. The title, which perhaps should end in a question mark, summarizes the problem for all of the characters: How can one distinguish between the bogus and the true? The “House of Cards” play-within-the-play is not real, although it initially seems to be, just as Annie’s affair initially promises true love. A subplot raises the question of what true political commitment involves (a question critics have asked about Stoppard) and of what defines true generosity and gratitude. There are repetitions and echoes of earlier scenes, with some acting as mirror images of each other. In spite of the apparent radical departure from his past style, The Real Thing remains pure Stoppard.

The Coast of Utopia

First produced: 2002 (first published, 2002)

Type of work: Plays (includes Voyage, Shipwreck, and Salvage)

The historical figure Alexander Herzen and his circle, exiled from Russia in the first half of the eighteenth century, try to provoke revolution in their homeland from afar in a trilogy depicting their disorderly, idealistic “voyage.”

The title The Coast of Utopia derives from the key motivation of almost all of the characters in this dramatic trilogy—the search for a perfect society. Ironically, utopias, as nonexistent (the word literally means “no place”), can have no coast. Yet this truth is repeatedly denied as Stoppard’s huge cast of revolutionaries and fellow travelers (forty-four actors in seventy roles in the New York production) insist that a new secular Eden lies just beyond the horizon, virtually within sight. The main candidates for that paradise are Russia and, briefly, France. The characters’ travels, from Russia to France, Germany, Switzerland, England, and Italy, meld their personal voyages, their political quests, and the coastal metaphor contained in the title of each part of the trilogy: Voyage, Shipwreck, and Salvage. The political activists expect a triumphant return home after places of temporary exile, mere jumping off points.

Stoppard’s courage in taking on this massive project is noteworthy. Beyond simple cast size, there is no explicit contemporary relevance to the discussion, and much is firmly anchored in nineteenth century political history, primarily the painful attempts to drag Russia into the modern world. The central characters may be unrecognizable by the nonspecialist, and the issues—the relative merits of Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling’s theories of reality—can be impenetrable even to the well-read. The Coast of Utopia is not art for art’s sake but is rather political theory for political theory’s sake, an uncompromising eight-hour-plus trek through the intellectual debates and issues of a long-past period. The politics, however, are always conjoined with the domestic lives of the radicals, who have difficult family politics, practicing a clumsy, awkward free love, complicated by a raft of small children running about the stage. Stoppard grounds his political debates in family life and personal relationships, showing how individual personalities shape the debate. The drama lies in the people professing the ideas, not just in the ideas themselves.

Voyage begins in 1833 on the estate of Alexander Bakunin, dramatizing the life of this wealthy landowner, his wife, and four daughters. It features his son, Michael, a willful, restless future radical prominent in the later plays; Alexander Herzen, a more restrained revolutionary and intellectual; Herzen’s childhood friend, Nicholas Ogarev; and their political circle, including the wonderfully drawn Vissarion Belinsky, an impoverished literary critic who insists, almost plausibly, that Russia has no literature. Author Ivan Turgenev appears in all three plays as a foil for the committed revolutionaries, creating art rather than trouble.

Shipwreck moves to Paris, Dresden, and Nice, following Herzen in particular as the other self-exiled Russians swirl around the Herzen family. The failure or “shipwreck” of the French Republic in 1848 is particularly shattering to the radicals, who nevertheless adopt new theories and models for the reform of Russia.

Salvage again features the Herzen household from 1853 to 1865, now in London and Geneva, with Herzen and Ogarev publishing The Bell in Russian and sending this muckraking newspaper to émigré groups and into Russia, even as they are superceded by harder-edged, uncompromising successors.

The American premiere of this trilogy, significantly revised by Stoppard, opened in New York City in 2006 to enthusiastic audiences and positive reviews, especially for its spectacle. Unlike earlier more intimate works, The Coast of Utopia is a grand mural, an opera of ideas, with all the virtues and drawbacks of a very large, ambitious work, one requiring an equally ambitious and expensive staging.