[Stoppard has] defined the quality that distinguished him from many of his contemporaries as "an absolute lack of certainty about almost anything." (p. 48)

There are signs, however, [in his most recent work, Every Good Boy Deserves Favour], that history has lately been forcing Stoppard into the arena of commitment…. [Every Good Boy Deserves Favour] started out in Stoppard's mind as a play about a Florida grapefruit millionaire, but his works have a way of changing their themes as soon as he sits down at his typewriter. The present setting is a Russian mental home for political dissidents, where the main job of the staff is to persuade the inmates that they are in fact insane. (p. 56)

Beneath its layers of Stoppardian irony, the play (oratorio? melo-drama?) is a point-blank attack on the way in which Soviet law is perverted to stifle dissent…. E.G.B.D.F. rests on the assumption that the difference between good and evil is obvious to any reasonable human being. What else does Stoppard believe in? For one thing, I would guess, the intrinsic merits of individualism; for another, a universe in which everything is relative yet in which moral absolutes exist; for a third, the probability that this paradox can be resolved only if we accept the postulate of a presiding deity. (pp. 56-7)

His career as a playwright began in 1960, when he wrote a one-act piece called The Gamblers, which he described to me in a recent letter as "Waiting for Godot in the death cell—prisoner and jailer—I'm sure you can imagine the rest."… [His first full-length play, A Walk on the Water, rewritten and retitled Enter a Free Man,] was so weightily influenced by Arthur Miller and by Robert Bolt's Flowering Cherry that he has come to refer to it as Flowering Death of a Salesman…. A Walk on the Water is about George Riley, a congenital self-deceiver who declares roughly once a week that he is going to achieve independence by leaving home and making his fortune as an inventor…. For all his dottiness … Riley has what Stoppard describes as "a tattered dignity." This attribute will recur in many Stoppard heroes, who have nothing to pit against the hostility of society and the indifference of the cosmos except their obstinate conviction that individuality is sacrosanct. (pp. 60-1)

Despite its multiple sources [Beckett, T. S. Eliot, Kafka, Oscar Wilde], Rosencrantz and Guildenstern is a genuine original, one of a kind. As far as I know, it is the first play to use another play as its décor. The English critic C. E. Montague described Hamlet as "a monstrous Gothic castle of a poem, full of baffled half-lights and glooms." This is precisely the setting of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern: it takes place in the wings of Shakespeare's imagination. The actor-manager who meets the two travellers on the road to Elsinore says that in life every exit is "an entrance somewhere else." In Stoppard's play, every exit is an entrance somewhere else in Hamlet. Sometimes he writes like a poet:

We cross our bridges when we come to them and burn them behind us, with nothing to show for our progress except a memory of the smell of smoke, and a presumption that once our eyes watered.

And at other times with fortune-cookie glibness:

Eternity is a terrible thought. I mean, where's it going to end?

But we are finally moved by the snuffing out of the brief candles he has lit. Tinged perhaps with sentimentality, an emotional commitment has nonetheless been made. (pp. 85-6)

The Real Inspector Hound … need not detain us long. It is a facetious puzzle that, like several of Stoppard's minor pieces, presents an apparently crazy series of events for which in the closing moments a rational explanation is provided. (p. 86)

Jumpers, produced in 1972, was the next milestone in Stoppard's career; but something should first be said of his work for radio, a medium he has used more resourcefully than any other contemporary English playwright. In Albert's Bridge (1967) and Artist Descending a Staircase (1972), both written for the BBC, he explores two of his favorite themes. The first is the relativity of absolutely everything. (It all depends on where you're sitting.) The second is the definition of art. (Is it a skill or a gift? Is it socially useful? Or does that, too, depend on where you're sitting?) (pp. 87-8)

[The catastrophe at the conclusion of Albert's Bridge is effective but it is] also a neat escape hatch for Stoppard, who is thus absolved from the responsibility of telling us which view of life we should espouse—the longshot or the closeup.

Artist Descending a Staircase has a plot that starts out backward and then goes forward…. [It] concerns the careers and beliefs of three artists, one of whom is dead and may have been murdered by the others, either of or by both working in cahoots. The title derives from Marcel Duchamp's painting Nude Descending a Staircase, and the play contains plenty of evidence that self-cannibalism is not alien to Stoppard. (pp. 88-9)

[Jumpers is] something unique in theatre: a farce whose main purpose is to affirm the existence of God. Or, to put it less starkly, a farcical defense of transcendent moral values. At the same time, it is an attack on pragmatic materialism as this is practiced by a political party called the Radical Liberals, who embody Stoppard's satiric vision of Socialism in action. (p. 93)

[Travesties] had its origin in Stoppard's discovery that James Joyce, Lenin, and Tristan Tzara, the founder of Dadaism, had all lived in Zurich during the First World War—a conjunction of expatriates that made instant comic connections in his mind. (p. 107)

I gladly concede that the grostesque rhetorical ramblings of Henry Carr, whether in soliloquy or in his long first-act confrontation with Tzara, are sublimely funny; but at the heart of the enterprise something is sterile and arbitrary. As Ronald Hayman, a devout Stoppard fan, put it, "there is no internal dynamic." Stoppard imposes the plot of Wilde's [The Importance of Being Earnest], itself thoroughly baroque, upon his own burlesque vision of life in wartime Zurich, which is like crossbreeding the bizarre with the bogus. (pp. 108-09)

[What Travesties lacks] is the sine qua non of theatre; namely, a narrative thrust that impels the characters, whether farcically or tragically or in any intermediate mode, toward a credible state of crisis, anxiety, or desperation…. In Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Inspector Hound, and Jumpers, acts of homicide are committed—acts insuring that a certain amount of pressure, however factitious, is exerted on the characters. They are obviously in trouble; they may be killed, or, at least, be accused of killing. Trying, as Stoppard does in Travesties, to make a play without the magic ingredient of pressure toward desperation is—to lift a phrase from Jumpers—"tantamount to constructing a Gothic arch out of junket." (pp. 109-10)

The hard polemic purpose of Travesties is to argue that art must be independent of the world of politics. (p. 111)

Stoppard's idol—the artist for art's sake, far above the squalid temptations of politics—is, unequivocally, Joyce. The first act ends with Henry Carr recounting a dream in which he asked Joyce what he did in the Great War. "'I wrote Ulysses,' he said. 'What did you do?'"

The implication of all this—that Joyce was an apolitical dweller in an ivory tower—is, unfortunately, untrue. He was a professed socialist. And this is where Stoppard's annexation of the right to alter history in the cause of art begins to try one's patience. (A minor symptom of the same sin occurs when Carr says that Oscar Wilde was "indifferent to politics"—a statement that will come as a surprise to readers of Wilde's propagandist handbook The Soul of Man Under Socialism.) (p. 112)

It is all very well for Stoppard to claim that he has mingled "scenes which are self-evidently documentary … with others which are just as evidently fantastical." The trouble with his portrait of Joyce is that it is neither one thing nor the other, neither pure fantasy nor pure documentary, but is simply based on a false premise. When matters of high importance are being debated, it is not pedantic to object that the author has failed to do his homework. (p. 113)