In this essay, Zeifman focuses on Hapgood to uncover a note of optimism which distinguishes Stoppard's plays from works by Samuel Beckett and other writers of absurdist drama.

In the essay below, Doll provides an overview of Stoppard's drama, noting the use of paradox, ambiguity, and humor, which characterize his work as "post-Absurdist. "

Dean explores the interrelation of politics and playwriting throughout much of Stopparci's work.

In this conversation, which was conducted in June 1974, Stoppard discusses his methods of composition, maintaining that the best writing is largely a "lucky accident."

Attempting to assess Stoppard's view of drama, Roberts notes the playwright's ambiguous pronouncements about his own work.

In the following essay, Kennedy discusses Stoppard's moral and political satire in Jumpers, Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, and Professional Foul.

Stoppard is that peculiar anomaly—a serious comic writer born in an age of tragicomedy and a renewed interest in theatrical realism. Such deviation from dramatic norms not only marks his original signature on the contemporary English stage, but has sometimes made it difficult for us to determine whether his unique posture of comic detachment has been "good," "bad," or simply "indifferent." "Seriousness compromised by frivolity" is not what we ha...

The following was first presented at a 1982 conference. Feeney contends that the seeming spontaneity of Stoppard's imagination obscures the careful craftsmanship of his plays, which, he claims, are structured around set of "parallel metaphors. "

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 w...

[Stoppard] is at his strongest when one precise meaning is transformed into another precise meaning with the context full-blown in each case. It is an elementary point to prove that a word can mean anything we choose it to mean. Many of us must have sometimes felt, when reading the later Wittgenstein, that he is not really saying anything about words which Lewis Carroll didn't say equally succinctly. The later Wittgenstein is in this regard the obverse of the early one, only instead of saying that a ...

The canon of Stoppard's work up to 1980 shares much with post-World War II art and literature in general and with contemporary British drama in particular. His works invite comparisons with the visual arts both because of his consideration of aesthetic questions through the eyes of painters (as in [Artist Descending A Staircase] or Travesties) or because of his extensive and often elaborate references to artists (as in After Magritte). His mutual concern with these artists is the nature, function, an...

Tom Stoppard's career can be divided into two unequal parts. From Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead in 1967 to Dirty Linen in 1976 he proved himself to be a very talented if suspiciously facile writer with an extraordinary control of the language. His plays were a constant string of puns, allusions and word play of all sorts, and if it sometimes seemed that they weren't actually about anything, their verbal pyrotechnics were delightfully self-justifying. Then, in the mid-1970s, Stoppard fo...

Tom Stoppard's playwrighting career may be said to parallel the progress of twentieth-century theater. His first play, Enter a Free Man, is a realistic comedy-drama. He then moves into the world of absurdity, which is dramatized in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, in his fiction, and in several shorter plays. Yet at the same time, he extends the limits of absurdity by dramatizing the outside world concretely, as a part of a recognizable social system. And in his latest plays he creates characte...

W. B. Yeats once called Ibsen the chosen author of very clever journalists. How much more appropriate this is as a description of Tom Stoppard. He has insinuated himself into the affections of smart people like a heartworm, usurping whatever place might once have been reserved there for genuine artists. Can anyone really take Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead seriously after seeing the plays on which it was based, Six Characters in Search of an Author and Waiting for Godot? I'm not complaining th...

["Night and Day"] surprises us by not surprising us. For the first time in his career, [Tom Stoppard] has written a conventionally straightforward melodrama, showing few traces of the breathtaking verbal acrobatics at the top of the tent of language with which he has previously dazzled us. There is much talk in the play, and it proves to be Shavian in a bad sense, which is to say that it is more garrulous than witty. A pertinent topic for discussion has been chosen by Teacher Tom: What does ou...