SOURCE: "A Trick of the Light: Tom Stoppard's Hapgood and Postabsurdist Theater," in Around the Absurd: Essays on Modern and Postmodern Drama, edited by

John Wood as Henry Carr in the 1974 Royal Shakespeare Company production of Travesties at the Aldwych Theatre in London.

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 a 1974 interview with the editors of Theatre Quarterly, Tom Stoppard was questioned about the genesis of his playwriting career [Theatre Quarterly IV, No. 4, May-July 1974]. A Walk on the Water, written in 1960 (but not staged in England until 1968, as Enter a Free Man), was considered "an unusual kind of first play" by the interviewers, containing little that was "autobiographical or seminal." Stoppard responded:

I don't...