Tom Stoppard is, by common consent, one of the leading playwrights working in Britain today. This course will explore three of his most engaging and fascinating works.
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead imagines the off-stage perplexities of two minor characters in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. From this de-centred perspective it addresses the nature of fiction and theatre, our need for meaning, and the fact of mortality. It both parodies the themes of Hamlet and plays variations on them in a different key.
The Real Thing is a play that gestures teasingly at autobiography. It sets us thinking about the truthfulness of the playwright’s art, the relation of art to politics, and the riskiness of love and how it escapes expression in words.
Arcadia brings together two sets of events that take place in a country-house nearly two centuries apart. It spins ideas about art and science, progression and recurrence, randomness and causality, and – once more – the power of love.
Clearly, Stoppard is interested in ideas. But his plays make no statements, and arguably come to no conclusions. His art is dedicated to the play of ideas, to exploring the ironies released when ideas are embodied in dramatic situations, and different worlds of thought and imagination encounter one another. The playfulness of his drama is superbly comic, wonderfully entertaining, yet also intensely humanly serious: the way in which playfulness and seriousness reinforce one another in his art will be the centre of our attention on this course.
(We may also be able to have some discussion of his new play Leopoldstadt, which opens in 2020. Extracts will be provided if so.)
Learning outcomes
- An understanding of the intellectual and cultural background to Stoppard’s plays;
- A grasp of the issues which they raise;
- Enhanced appreciation of their wit and comedy, and of the value and function of such comedy.
