That self-referential art and self-indulgent revolution grow from the same soil is a proposition with which Tom Stoppard is familiar, and there are few modern playwrights who could bring a more formidable intelligence to bear on it. Stoppard's own plays—which are, almost all of them, plays within plays—grow from the demand that Art should be its own subject. At the same time politics provides their occasion, and no politics fascinates Stoppard more than that which has issued from the revolutionary consciousness.

In Travesties (1975), he exploited the accidental, or not-so-accidental, coincidence in Zurich of Tristan Tzara (the arch proponent of the Absolute in Art) and Lenin (the arch political absolutist). With them also is James Joyce, and much of the play—a clever collage made from Oscar Wilde's Earnest, the Ithaca chapter in Ulysses, Lenin's letters and speeches, and Tzara's boyish nonsense—is devoted to the contrast between Dada and Ulysses. There is no doubt whose side Stoppard is on. Joyce's novel, like Tzara's badinage, is supremely conscious of its artistry; but it also justifies every word by a vision of reality, whereas Dada is nothing more than self-advertisement. "If there is any meaning in any of it, it is in what survives as art", says Joyce, who demolishes the talentless self-reference of Dada, but will not deny that it is art, and not life, which is the purveyor of value. But Joyce poses a question: does art have reality because life is its raw material, or does life gain reality from the meanings contained in art? What, in short, is the real thing? Lenin, who stands apart from the other characters, sifting his benighted pedantries, shows the relentlessness of the shadow world. Yet it is not a real world. Lenin's words are dead, unfeeling, a patter of urgencies which occasionally rattles across the stage. Revolution can be translated into slogans, but not into art. Hence, if all meanings must be borrowed from art, revolution remains unmeaning, a seething pool of darkness, always advancing, always betraying, but never real.

But when revolution has cleared the world of its old significance, something still remains. In the artless desert of the totalitarian state a germ of reality struggles to exist, and to be born again. This struggle for existence provides the theme of Stoppard's most unconventional creation, a play for orchestra (Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, 1977), and also that of his most conventional, the effective television drama called Professional Foul (1977). In this second play Stoppard shows just what is at stake in the call for "human rights" that was epitomised in the Czech "Charter 77." In a cleverly contrived "lecture within a play" he argues that it does not matter if there are no natural rights. The point is rather that all social relations, and all morality, are founded in individual encounters. There cannot be society without the experience of self; and from that experience grows the inescapable sense of a sphere of inviolability. To deny rights is to deny the individual's sense of himself as a member of society, and so to deny society. The totalitarian denial of the self is therefore also a self-denial. In being everywhere, the totalitarian state ceases to be anywhere. Its massive power is, as the Czechs like to point out, also a banalisation of power, an invasion of all experience, all society, and all power, by a sense of pointlessness. The vast machinery of the revolutionary state proves itself unreal.

So there is something, after all, which provides the criterion against which meanings may be measured—a criterion outside art, and outside, or inside politics. But how can we summon up this "individual existence" … which can be understood only as a remainder? Before the invention of Art, novelists, playwrights and poets were able unselfconsciously to provide the social context and moral security with which to describe and to justify the individual self. Outside society, however, the self is nothing, a substance without attributes, matter without form. When society renews itself, then the individual also is renewed. But when society decays, the individual retreats into inscrutable subjectivity. How, then, can we guarantee his reality, and how obtain from him the significance which we desire?

Here we see the great puzzle that confronts modern art. Art can be the fount of reality only if it can also guarantee the reality of the individual, whose experience contains the clue to what is real. But the individual lies outside art, and outside the laws of art, hiding behind every mask, every persona, that art provides for him. The individual can be crushed, but not commanded. (pp. 44-5)

In what is perhaps his most brilliant play, Stoppard expresses his intense dissatisfaction with the self-involvement of modern art. Artist Descending a Staircase (1972), written for radio, shows two ageing painters, Martello and Beauchamp, who were young in the era of Duchamp (from whom the title is adapted). They are quarrelling over the death of their companion, Donner, also an artist, who fell (or was pushed) to his death, containing within himself the unsolved riddle of their existence. It transpires that the dead man alone had felt true love, towards Sophie, the blind mistress of Beauchamp. At his death Donner was working on a realistic portrait of Sophie, who herself had died, perhaps by suicide, and in any event by defenestration, on being rejected by Beauchamp. Donner's return to artistic realism comes at the end of a life of aesthetic experiment. As Donner says, "I very much enjoyed my years in that child's garden of easy victories known as the avant-garde, but I am now engaged in the infinitely more difficult task of painting what the eye sees…." But of course, the eye no longer sees it: so where lies the reality of the portrait? Only in Donner's love for Sophie, who rejected him, and who therefore refuted his love. Or did she? She loved only the artist whom she saw, before her eyes failed, beside an abstract painting at the trio's first exuberant exhibition. But had she perhaps confused Beauchamp's abstract with Donner's? With failing sight, how is it possible to distinguish between paintings, each of which abstracts towards the same point of insignificance? So had she in fact loved Donner thinking him to be Beauchamp, or rather, Beauchamp, thinking him to be Donner? What would it be, in any case, to love the individual, rather than his qualities, and what can art show that is more than quality? In a dizzying concentration of philosophical jokes, Stoppard points both to the comedy, and to the seriousness, of dead Donner's predicament. Donner's art is nothing without the individual experience which is its reality, but this experience is founded in an art which provides no definition or guarantee. What, in all this, is the real thing?

The title of the new play, The Real Thing, is shared with a famous story by Henry James, in which two pathetic old-fashioned individuals (confident at least of their reality, since it is the product of a social order which they have yet to question) are forced by penury to pose for a painter. A fatal mistake. In the glare of art their social guarantee, and hence their reality, evaporates. Only anxiety remains. Stoppard's artist is Henry, a playwright … who lives in the dilemma posed by his art, not knowing whether his experience is the creature or the creator of his plays. (pp. 45-6)

Once again the revolutionary consciousness appears, in the person of an ignorant Scottish soldier, Brodie. Brodie has become a fashionable radical cause, having taken part in a Peace March, burning a wreath as he passed the Cenotaph, and so ending up in jail on a charge of arson. Much of the plot turns on this character, who appears only at the end, but who is the recipient of concern from Henry's second wife Annie…. While in prison Brodie writes a play about his experience, including his meeting with Annie on a train. Annie seeks to have this play performed. Through Henry, Stoppard is able to strike some well-aimed blows at the posturing of the radical chic, and at the emotional fantasies which find release in facile indignations. But what Henry objects to is the terrible abuse of language which the revolutionary consciousness entails. Brodie, says Henry's friend Max, "got hammered by an emotional backlash", and Henry protests, "No, no, you can't …", so precipitating a quarrel for the sake of words. Or is it for the sake of words? Max complains that "that's what life's about—messy bits of good and bad luck, and people caring and not necessarily having all the answers…." Henry's obsession with language, he implies, is no more than a snobbish isolation from the ordinary conscience.

Max's words are intended to support Annie, but it turns out that she cares neither for Brodie nor his cause, but only for the theatrical gesture with which she had originally enticed him into it; while Brodie himself, we discover, so far from being the real thing, is a jumped-up creation of the theatre, the quality of whose sentiments is revealed by the appalling language of his play. Henry cunningly compares Brodie's play to a cudgel used in place of a cricket bat: "What we're trying to do is to write cricket bats, so that when we throw up an idea and give it a little knock, it might travel…."—and the image is developed in a masterly and devastating criticism of the radical butchery of language…. (p. 46)

In the end, we are to understand, the fault of Brodie's language is not that it is crude, heavy, gratuitous—although it is all of those—but that it is unreal. Nothing speaks from it, nothing comes out of it, besides itself. By posturing as the real thing, the thing outside art, it loses the aid which art can bring. It too becomes self-referential. But unlike art, which strives always to make room in its centre for the individual experience, the jargon-ridden language of revolution makes room only for itself. Its self-reference is of a more deadly kind; it is like a blind drawn down on our only window on the world, where we stand hopelessly looking for that elusive thing, the self.

In the second act the tone of the play becomes increasingly serious, as Stoppard tries to provide the reality which he has promised, the reality, as it transpires, of love between Henry and Annie. But the writing becomes looser, and at times disjointed. Too much cleverness has been stored in the first part of the play, and there is little room for more. Only the theatricalisation of Brodie has yet to be accomplished, in a little vignette of slapstick; when it is over Henry and Annie are left wordless and incomplete. In one way this is inevitable, but it prompts one to reflect on the imperfection of Stoppard's art.

Stoppard is not a dramatist—he does not portray characters, who develop in relation to each other, and generate dialogue from their mutual constraints. He strings characters like puppets on a line of repartee: his masters are Wilde and Shaw, and his ideal of dialogue is an exhange not of feelings, but of epigrams. The real thing is never in his words, which contain only the idea of it, in the form of brilliantly staged metaphysical conundrums. The result is of course good theatre…. But is is the effect of theatre—a kind of theatresque—and an effect without a cause cannot be described as quite the real thing. (p. 47)