Along with Harold Pinter, Tom Stoppard is probably the most important playwright on the contemporary British scene. His plays, like those of Pinter, are informed with a tragicomic sense of the absurd and the contingent nature of man's existence. A frequently recurring character in Stoppard's plays is the marginal man, the character standing on the fringe of the central action, tentatively placing first one foot and then the other into the arena of activity…. Man's confrontation with his world is a recurring theme in Stoppard's plays. Whether rendered in the form of two minor characters from a Shakespearean play assuming heroic status (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead), a professor of moral philosophy discoursing on God while his exshowgirl wife plays surrealistic games (Jumpers, 1972), or a pseudohistorical meeting in a Zurich library of three radically different revolutionaries, Lenin, Joyce, and Tristan Tzara (Travesties, 1974), the theme of man's relationship to reality—his insignificance, exile, and search for self—is manifest.

As important as Stoppard's philosophical explorations, however, is his preoccupation with his own art. Stoppard's plays are nonrealistic in form, undisguisedly theatrical, and supremely self-conscious. Indeed, the playwright has succeeded admirably in uniting the innovative form of his plays with their philosophical content, making his ventures into the nature of reality—and illusion—inquiries into the very rationale for art. One of Stoppard's less well-known plays, The Real Inspector Hound,… is a particularly fine example of how a playwright integrates these concerns through the use of a metafictional character. (pp. 90-1)

Stoppard's characters acquire metafictional status by virtue of play within play. In the case of The Real Inspector Hound, this "play" is formalized into a structural demand. The characters, who are made to function within two structural units, acquire one identity in the frame play—their "real" identities—and quite another in the inner play—their fictive identities. But the distinction between the identities, and, indeed, between the plays, remains less than absolute. As the characters move across the boundary that separates the outer play from the inner one, the line which separates their identities as critics and members of an audience from their identities as actors and participants in the "whodunit" play becomes increasingly fluid…. In creating first a rigid structural line of demarcation and then violating that line through his protagonists' entrance into the inner play, Stoppard is able to use the play-within-a-play not simply in the traditional way, for enhancing reality, but rather to suggest the nature of role playing and the power of illusion over reality. (p. 91)

Moon and Birdboot, Stoppard's fictive critics [in The Real Inspector Hound], position themselves in the front row of … the fictive audience. Through this setting, Stoppard is honoring (if only playfully) the classical concept of art imitating nature—the audience is face to face not only with a stage, but with itself. And he is also suggesting, paradoxically, the mirror as a symbol of illusion.

Our initial response to Moon and Birdboot (before the play-within-a-play begins) is amused self-recognition. (pp. 91-2)

When the play-within-a-play begins, the way in which we view Moon and Birdboot instantly changes. While their identities to this point are those of actors in a mimetic play, when Mrs. Drudge walks on the stage between the critics and audience and begins the Muldoon Manor play, Moon and Birdboot are no longer simply fictive characters. In the presence of Mrs. Drudge, we find ourselves making a distinction between the status of the housekeeper and that of the critics, and as she and the inhabitants of Muldoon Manor take us deeper into the fictionalized world of the play-within-a-play, we increasingly tend to view the frame play, which consists of the conversations of Moon and Birdboot, as an extension of our own reality rather than as play…. In fact, we allow Moon and Birdboot virtually to lose their fictionalized status by repeatedly looking to them for their reactions. (p. 92)

Through the creation of two separate plays, Stoppard manipulates his audience into a compartmentalizing of characters; once the dichotomy of play world and "nonplay" world is established, he proceeds to upset any certainty with respect to those worlds by integrating the plays. (p. 93)

The Real Inspector Hound is … about "the nature of identity," its central concern being that of a functional or role-playing self. The plight of the critics is reminiscent of our own acquiescence to the demands of social convention, which constantly force us to assume a fictive identity and may result in the essential self's becoming indistinguishable from the role…. Like actors who assume the part imposed upon them, the individual, by assuming social roles, is sacrificing his essential self. (pp. 95-6)

The end of the play sees a mass interchange of identities…. Now Moon's earlier remark that the play has started and that this is just a pause becomes meaningful. The play is an endless cycle in which two actors—who are, after all, fictive—begin as observers and assume roles within the play they are watching until the line between their reality and the fiction no longer exists. Just as the whodunit play had earlier served to authenticate the critics' reality, now it serves to betray it. Once the fictionalized reality of Moon and Birdboot has become pure fiction, the play, despite its cyclic nature, must end. The audience cannot view the next cycle, since it cannot now accept the two men in the critics' seats as real, and the play depends completely upon that acceptance. In order for the play to continue there must be a new audience, and the line between reality and fiction must again be established.

But Stoppard's play is not only about identity, it is about art as well. The dichotomy between the real and the fictive self which his metafictional characters embody extends as well to the relationship between art and reality. (p. 96)

Stoppard's use of the play-within-a-play structure is in one respect like Shakespeare's use of the device in Hamlet: the inner play does indeed fulfill the purpose of art, which is to hold a mirror up to nature. The experience of Birdboot (who is audience) is faithfully duplicated in the inner play. But Stoppard originally told us that his mirror image was "impossible," and his fidelity to the mimetic theory ends with this token honoring.

In fact, art emerges in The Real Inspector Hound as a force capable of controlling reality…. Stoppard sets up the play-within-a-play structure so that the distinction between reality and illusion is established, but the distinction is made only so that it might be destroyed. By the end of The Real Inspector Hound, the inner play breaks through the boundary separating it from the outer play and encompasses the outer play. In mimetic art, illusion may, in a sense, be said to be giving up its identity, trying to pass for reality. In Stoppard's art, illusion is autonomous. When the inner play breaks through its boundary, illusion imposes itself upon reality, in essence destroying the right of reality to be separately defined….

In Stoppard's earlier play, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, a similar set of first marginally involved and then seriously involved characters exists. Every bit as unperceptive as their counterparts in Inspector Hound, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern become victims of the play, which defines and controls them. Though philosophically consistent and structurally similar, however, the two plays are hardly carbon copies. (p. 97)

[Despite its derivative nature, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern] possesses indisputable originality, particularly in the way in which Rosencrantz and Guildenstern achieve their own unique status as metafictional characters.

Though levity is characteristic of most of Stoppard's plays,… that lightness is frequently a surface quality under which more serious concerns lie. Surely this is the case with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern…. A decade and a half removed from their tramp predecessors [in Waiting for Godot], however, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern occupy a world in which the questions have changed to premises. The arbitrary quality of the universe which puzzles Vladimir to frustration is a donnée of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern's world, in which even the laws of chance no longer exist: the two flip a coin ninety-two times and watch it turn up heads each time, the unbewildered Rosencrantz experiencing only embarrassment at having won all of Guildenstern's coins. Far from searching for significance in the macrocosm, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern care only about affirming the significance of their own little lives. As Rosencrantz says, "We don't question, we don't doubt. We perform." It is the fact of this performance which is at the heart of Stoppard's investigation into the play's more serious concerns.

Structurally, Stoppard uses a variation of the play-within-a-play to create his characters' metafictional status. The outer play is the ordinary world of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern…. The inner play is Hamlet…. Our experience with metafictional characters in a play-within-a-play structure tells us to view the coin flippers, the occupants of the frame play, as "real" and Hamlet's spy friends, the occupants of the inner play, as fictive. But the fact that these characters have an existence which precedes the Stoppard play alters this. Surely Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, though speaking in a modern tongue inappropriate to their Elizabethan garb, can be none other than Shakespeare's illfated pair. The fact is that the characters' dramatic existence does not begin with Act I of the Stoppard play; the characters have an inseparable preexistence which significantly affects our response. Though we are aware of the duality, we cannot with comfort divide the metafictional characters into the fictive and the real…. (pp. 98-9)

Whether we view the inner play or the outer play as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern's real world, however, is not so important as the fact which Stoppard reveals in endowing his characters with literary preexistence. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern may well exemplify Sartre's existential premise, but for them the essence which precedes existence is itself fictive, reducing (or elevating) the status of these two to pure fiction. Indeed, the theatrical metaphor which sustains itself throughout the play underscores the playwright's vision of life as essent ally dramatic and of living as nothing more than playing a role. (p. 99)

That there is no other life for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern outside of the Shakespeare play, outside of their roles, is affirmed by Stoppard's final tableau, in which the bodies of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern become the subject of the ceremony afforded Hamlet in Olivier's film version, receiving all the circumstance due dead heroes. (p. 101)

What Rosencrantz and Guildenstern never realize is that they are part of a larger action than that of their own little lives. The two may go to their deaths without resistance, but they never comprehend what it means to be part of a greater plan. From his limited perspective, Guildenstern blames their fate on the boat:

Where we went wrong was getting on a boat. We can move, of course, change direction, rattle about, but our movement is contained within a larger one that carries us along as inexorably as the wind and the current….

Though he doesn't know it, Guildenstern's boat has metaphorical import, offering a wry comment on modern man's faith in free will and a bold statement on the nature of art. The confinement of which Guildenstern speaks suggests the limitations of both the individual in life and the character in drama, both of whom are free, "within limits, of course."… The inexorability describes the demands imposed both upon man by virtue of the inevitability of death and upon the dramatic character by virtue of the script. (pp. 101-02)

In their confusion and fear, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern never suspect that they may fare better as fictional characters than as real ones, for once they enter the Hamlet play they become part of an ordered universe which could not permit a coin to turn up heads ninety-two times. As the head of the players explains, "… there's a design at work in all art…. Events must play themselves out to aesthetic, moral and logical conclusion."… Furthermore, in the world of play, the dead actor can rise again for an encore. (p. 102)

In The Real Inspector Hound Stoppard toys with the concept of the mimetic quality of art, creating situations in the frame play and the inner play which are strikingly similar. In Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, mimesis, like the ill-fated pair, is dead. The dumb show may preserve its sanctity, but the inner play proper neither reflects nor distorts the reality of the outer play, for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern prove to have no existence outside Hamlet. Their entire time in the outer play is overshadowed by our knowledge that they are Shakespeare's, and not Stoppard's, characters; like modern man alienated from an orderly world, their "real" lives only serve to anticipate their immortal roles. Where in The Real Inspector Hound the Muldoon Manor play succeeds in encompassing the outer play, in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Hamlet absorbs its frame completely, rendering the protagonists without their Hamlet roles nonentities. In both plays, whether the characters' fates are determined by the slick whodunit play or the Shakespearean masterpiece, the power of Stoppard's art is supreme. (p. 103)

June Schlueter, "Stoppard's Moon and Birdboot, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern," in her Metafictional Characters in Modern Drama (copyright © 1977, 1979 Columbia University Press; reprinted by permission of the publisher), Columbia University Press, 1979, pp. 89-103.