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Tom Stoppard’s Plays
Costerus New Series
Editors
C.C. Barfoot
László Sándor Chardonnens
Theo D’haen
VOLUME 217
The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/cos

Tom Stoppard’s Plays
Patterns of Plenitude and Parsimony
By
Nigel Purse
LEIDEN | BOSTON
Cover illustration: Tom Stoppard at the Duke of York’s Theatre, London by Daniel Hambury/Stella Pictures
Limited
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Purse, Nigel, author.

Title: Tom Stoppard’s plays : patterns of plenitude and parsimony / by Nigel
Purse.
Description: Leiden ; Boston : Brill Rodopi, [2016] | Series: Costerus new
series ; 217 | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016034423 (print) | LCCN 2016044701 (ebook) | ISBN
9789004318366 (hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN 9789004319653 (E-book)
Subjects: LCSH: Stoppard, Tom--Criticism and interpretation.
Classification: LCC PR6069.t6 z846 2016 (print) | LCC PR6069.t6 (ebook) | DDC
822/.914--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016034423
Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface.
issn 0165-9618
isbn 978-90-04-31836-6 (hardback)
isbn 978-90-04-31965-3 (e-book)
Copyright 2017 by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, The Netherlands.

Koninklijke Brill nv incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi and
Hotei Publishing.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system,
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This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

To my family
⸪
It’s no trick loving somebody at their best. Love is loving them at their
worst.
The Real Thing
⸪
Contents
Preface xi
Acknowledgements xv
Prologue xxii
Plenitude xxiv
Patterns xxvii
Parsimony xxx
1 Occam’s Razor 1
Stoppard and Occam’s Razor 3
Occam’s Razor Applied Structurally 5
Occam’s Razor Applied to Writing 15
Occam’s Razor Applied to an Argument–Metaphysical 19
Occam’s Razor Applied to an Argument–Methodological 22
Storm in a Teacup 23
‘You don’t have to be Einstein’ 37
Defining the Question 41
The Language of Symbols’ 47
Anti-razor 52
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead 53
Parsimony 55
2 The Stoppardian Stage Debate 57

Intellectual Ping-Pong 62
Internal Debate 70
The Debate in the Vehicle 74
The Multi-Faceted Debate 79
Internal Contradictions 84
Skirmishes 117
The Multi-Play Debate 121
Parsimony 125
3 The Vehicle versus the Idea 126

‘Et in Arcadia ego!’ 136
‘Mental Acrobatics’ 152
The Play-Within-A-Play 159
The Vehicle Comes First 182
The Worked Example 185
viii Contents
The Vehicle as Man 193

Misalignment? 222
Too Complicated? 225
Parsimony 234
4 Ethics 235
Absolutism versus Relativism–Morality 238
God 249
Truth 261
Free Speech 277
Freedom 298
Fate 308
Art 324
Absolutism versus Relativism–General 336
Parsimony 360
5 Dualism–Illusion and Reality 361

Illusion and Reality 362
Duality 397
Parsimony 423
6 Stoppard’s Theatricality 427

Comedy 431
The Pun 436
The Intellectual Joke 438
The Double Entendre 440
Malapropisms 442
The Cheap Gag 443
Farce 446
The Cross Purpose 451
The Running Gag 454
Satire 458
Parody 463
Straightforward Wit 468
Visual Effects 470
Poetry 473
Music 477
Opening Scenes 490
Nudity 497
Mystery 498
Contents ix
Art 504
Adaptations 509
Literary Influences 513
Beckett 527
Chekhov 537
Shakespeare 547
Parsimony 559
7 Stoppard’s Time Shifts 560

Emotional Recall 561
Perspective 566
Integrating the Idea 569
Reprising the Debate 576
Narrative Recall 578
Parsimony 578
8 Coda 580
Appendix 1: Hamlet vs Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead 585

Appendix 2: Indian Ink – Timeline 604
Appendix 3: The Coast of Utopia – Timeline 606
Bibliography 609
Index
Works by Tom Stoppard 628
Characters in Stoppard’s Works 631
General Index 638
Preface
…he just wants to hear what you’re thinking.1

ursula, The Hard Problem
∵
I wrote a play once. It was an appalling experience, both for me and the hand-
ful of unfortunate souls whom I allowed to read it. ‘Undramatic’ was one of the
kindest verdicts on it. For me, the baring of my innermost intellect and creative
thoughts, such as they are, was truly painful, particularly in exchange for no
beneficial gain at all. I was reminded of the adage: ‘Those who can, do; those
who cannot, talk about it’. In this case, substitute ‘write’ for ‘talk’. But, why Stop-
pard and why write yet another book about his work?
Stoppard once said, in reference to his admiration for Hemingway, ‘One
gets badly bitten by writers perhaps only two or three times, between the ages
of eight and eighteen’.2 In my case it was when I was sixteen and my English
master, John Davison, gave the class a copy of Jumpers. That play was a revela-
tion to me. It was dynamite in the hands of a young man with an enquiring
mind, eager to awaken his intellect to risk and experimentation. No matter
that Stoppard intends his plays to be played, not read – ‘I don’t write plays for
discussion…I think of a play as an event in the theatre’,3 he told Janet Watts
in 1973 – as we read it round in class I was seduced. Seduced by the mental
and linguistic gymnastics, yes. Seduced by the dramatic effect of the theatrical
1 The Hard Problem, page 21.

2 Stoppard, ‘Reflections on Ernest Hemingway’, page 2.
3 Stoppard, in an interview with J.Watts, Guardian, 21 March 1973, page 12 in T. Bareham (ed),
Tom Stoppard: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, Jumpers & Travesties, page 34, in
P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 49. Stoppard told Jon Bradshaw that,
‘No plays are written to be studied and discussed any more than pictures are painted to be
discussed’. – J. Bradshaw, ‘Nonstop: Word Games with a Hit Playwright’ in P. Delaney (ed),
Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 98. Stoppard told Mel Gussow, ‘Plays are events rather
than texts. They’re written to happen, not to be read’. – “The dissident is a discordant note in
a highly orchestrated society” in M. Gussow, Conversations with Stoppard, page 37. See also
Stoppard, ‘Playwrights and professors’, Times Literary Supplement, 13 October 1972, page 1219:
‘I have never written anything for discussion’.
xii Preface
machinations, for sure. But, above all, entranced by the ability to express, ex-
plore and articulate ideas and arguments. I never looked back and have eagerly
awaited Stoppard’s every next offering ever since.
A good deal of literature about Stoppard and his works is intimidatingly
good. The scholarship of Fleming, Delaney, Nadel, Demastes and Gussow is
particularly fine and unsurpassable. But, I still feel that there is room for an-
other book. Most of the work on Stoppard takes a vertical approach. It runs
through plays one by one or takes a chronological approach. There is nothing
wrong with that and I have enjoyed huge amounts of it. This book takes the
road less travelled; in every sense. It tries to address Stoppard’s work horizon-
tally: that is to say, by picking out the patterns of the key themes across all
his works. More ambitiously, it also tries to work them into an overall context.
A loose context – one of patterns and, ultimately, that of Occam’s razor – but
an overall context nevertheless.
I also feel that there is a need to explain much of Stoppard’s work. He admits
that, ‘I’ve always been stingy with information in my plays’.4 It is not just a case
of filling out quantum mechanical arguments or Chaos Theory. Relating some
of the ideas in The Coast of Utopia to Herzen’s own writing or identifying the
link between Every Good Boy Deserves Favour and Orwell’s 1984 can be illumi-
nating. Given that so many of the ideas that Stoppard covers are embodied in
the action or plot in some way, understanding how Travesties relates to The Im-
portance of Being Earnest, for example, adds to the understanding of the argu-
ments Stoppard is making. Sometimes it is even revealing to see what Stoppard
leaves out. However, I hope that I have done rather more than simply produce
a series of ‘useless truths’5 that so roundly irritate Stoppard.
In terms of the book’s research into what lies behind the plays, rather than
just focussing on what the plays achieve in production on stage, I am aware
that it flies in the face of even Stoppard himself.6 I am aware, too, of the disdain
4 Stoppard, in an interview with N. Hytner, 6 February 2015. In an interview with Roger Bolton
Stoppard argued, ‘I like to do as little as possible, in other words give as little information
out as possible.…I am much more frightened of being over-explicit than under-explicit’. –
Feedback, bbc Radio 4, 5 January 2016. These statements are to be contrasted with his com-
ment that, ‘Nothing I’ve ever done is supposed to be remotely bewildering’, in an interview
with K. Kelly and W. Demastes, ‘The Playwright and the Professors: An Interview With Tom
Stoppard’ in South Central Review, Volume 11, Number 4, Winter 1994.
5 Stoppard, ‘Playwrights and Professors’, Times Literary Supplement, 13 October 1972, page 1219.
6 Other commentators have noted the need for background information. For example, see
Jim Hunter’s verdict on Travesties: ‘Though generally seen as one of Stoppard’s best plays, it
does present a basic difficulty: it assumes considerable advance knowledge in its audience’. –
J. Hunter, Tom Stoppard Faber Critical Guides, page 105. He cites a need to be cognizant with
Preface xiii
there is in Stoppard’s plays for researchers, such as Eldon Pike in Indian Ink and
Bernard Nightingale in Arcadia. But, I genuinely believe that Stoppard reserves
his frustration merely for bad researchers. In fact, he once wrote, ‘I don’t have
any disdain for the prestige of criticism’.7 I hope, too, that the satire he vents
on critics is directed at hacks rather than serious commentators.8 So, perhaps,
this book, too, will turn out to be an appalling experience for both the author
and the reader. I do hope not. For the duration of its writing I felt like Father
McKenzie, ‘writing the words of a sermon that no one will hear’. But, I was im-
pelled by Hannah’s words, spoken in Arcadia, to finish the task no matter what
the outcome – ‘Better to struggle on knowing that failure is final’.9
I was never lucky enough to meet Stoppard. This is probably for the best.
I am sure I would either have been overwhelmed by fear of what to say to such
a great mind or uttered something embarrassingly obsequious. My wife and
daughters did meet him, briefly, at the stage door of The Old Vic. I, sensibly,
shied away. I have seen him several times. He typically turns up unannounced
at productions of his plays. I first saw him at the Aldwych in 1985, his back
turned in the corner of the crush bar, trying very hard not to be recognised, in
the interval during a production of Jumpers with Paul Eddington and Felicity
Kendal. He realised as he caught my eye that I, unlike everyone else in the bar,
knew who he was. I would never have betrayed his privacy. We next encoun-
tered each other by eyesight at the ticket desk of the Piccadilly Theatre where
both he and my wife and I were collecting tickets for that night’s performance
of, again, Jumpers; this time with Simon Russell Beale. He was, mercifully, in a
hurry and not lingering. Again, he realised that I knew who he was. I fancied
to myself that he was formulating a play in which a famous playwright keeps
meeting at productions of his plays an admirer who never has the courage to
The Importance of Being Earnest, Ulysses, Dadaism and twentieth-century Russian history.
Hunter’s comment that, ‘Nobody watching Travesties or Arcadia picks up every allusion or
textual intricacy’, (About Stoppard: the Playwright & the Work, page 42) might well be applied
to all Stoppard’s plays.
7 Stoppard, ‘Unidentified lecture re. Rough Crossing and translation’.
8 Stoppard admitted in reference to Night And Day that, ‘I admire good professionals’, and
that, ‘I admire Wagner as a person because he takes his job seriously and is good at it and
isn’t a hack’. – Stoppard, in an interview with D. Gollob and D. Roper, ‘Trad Tom Pops In’ in
P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, pages 162 and 163. On 13 June 2015 Stoppard
was reported in The Times as saying that he had invented a quotation and its source in the
programme notes for Arcadia at the Royal National Theatre in 1993. The attribution was to
JF. Shade (1898–1959) who may well be a reference to the fictional author in Nabokov’s novel
Pale Fire. A poem, also entitled ‘Pale Fire’, in the book contains elements of duality.
9 Arcadia, page 100.
xiv Preface
introduce himself but still keeps accidentally bumping into him. Further unin-
troduced encounters occurred at productions of The Real Thing and Arcadia.
I was encouraged by many people to seek an interview with Stoppard but I
declined to pursue such a route on the advice of Stoppard himself. When asked
what it is like having experts and academics analyse his work he replied:
The thing that happens remarkably often is that the people who are writ-
ing a dissertation believe they need to speak to me in order to do their
dissertation. They need to interview me. I have a stock reply which is that
‘the examiner wants to know what you think, not what I think’. I write
polite little notes, which say: ‘Honestly, you do not need me, you think
you do but I am irrelevant to what you are doing’. Obviously, the yes or no
factual questions I can answer, but the interpretations…The whole thing
derives from a misapprehension about creative writing, which is that the
writer is working from a set of principles or a thesis and the play is the
end product of that predisposition, but, actually, the idea turns out to
be the end product of the play, and the less I know about this play I am
trying to write, the better.10
I took to heart the advice at the top of this Preface, given to Hilary by Ursula in
The Hard Problem. So, this book is unashamedly what I think. By its very nature
literary analysis is derivative but, notwithstanding all the help I have received
from various people and sources, the ideas in this book remain my thoughts
and conclusions. Any errors and omissions are mine, too.
Living close to London has accorded me the most wonderful privilege of
seeing the original productions of such plays as Arcadia, Rock ‘N’ Roll and The
Coast of Utopia trilogy. It has also enabled me to see revivals of some of his less
frequently produced or harder to stage plays, such as Every Good Boy Deserves
Favour, After Magritte, New-Found-Land and Artist Descending a Staircase (in a
room above a pub in Islington). Having been too young to have heard his early
radio plays I was delighted to be able to hear his fine return to the medium,
Darkside, on its first broadcast in 2013. I have even directed a production of
The Real Inspector Hound (when I was nineteen and still at school) – actually, it
was more a case of the cast directing itself. It is my fervent hope that one day,
somebody, somewhere will establish an annual Stoppard festival at which his
works are continually revived and produced.
Nigel Purse
10 Stoppard, in an interview with N. Farndale, The Telegraph, 19 January 2010.

Acknowledgements
Permission to quote from the Stoppard plays worldwide excluding the usa, the
Philippines and its Dependencies as detailed in the attached schedule:
A SEPARATE PEACE by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 1966) is printed by

permission of United Agents llp (www.unitedagents.co.uk).
AFTER MAGRITTE by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 1970) is printed by
ALBERT’S BRIDGE by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 1969) is printed by
ANOTHER MOON CALLED EARTH by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 1967)
is printed by permission of United Agents llp (www.unitedagents.co.uk).
ARCADIA by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 1993) is printed by permission of
United Agents llp (www.unitedagents.co.uk).
ARTIST DESCENDING A STAIRCASE by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 1972)
is printed by permission of United Agents llp (www.unitedagents.co.uk).
DALLIANCE by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 1986) is printed by permission
of United Agents llp (www.unitedagents.co.uk).
DARKSIDE by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 2013) is printed by permission
DIRTY LINEN by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 1976) is printed by permis-
sion of United Agents llp (www.unitedagents.co.uk).
DOGG’S HAMLET, CAHOOT’S MACBETH by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard
1979) is printed by permission of United Agents llp (www.unitedagents
.co.uk).
ENTER A FREE MAN by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 1968) is printed by
EVERY GOOD BOY DESERVES FAVOUR by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard
1977) is printed by permission of United Agents llp (www.unitedagents.
co.uk).
HAPGOOD by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 1988) is printed by permission
IF YOU’RE GLAD I’LL BE FRANK by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 1969) is
printed by permission of United Agents llp (www.unitedagents.co.uk).
IN THE NATIVE STATE by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 1991) is printed by
INDIAN INK by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 1995) is printed by permission
xvi Acknowledgements
IVANOV by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 2008) is printed by permission of

JUMPERS by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 1972) is printed by permission of
LARGO DESOLATO by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 198) is printed by
LORD MALQUIST AND MR MOON by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard
1966) is printed by permission of United Agents llp (www.unitedagents
.co.uk).
‘M’ IS FOR MOON AMONG OTHER THINGS by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stop-
pard 1964) is printed by permission of United Agents llp (www.uniteda-
gents.co.uk).
NEUTRAL GROUND by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 1968) is printed by
NEW-FOUND-LAND by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 1976) is printed by
NIGHT AND DAY by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 1978) is printed by
ON ‘DOVER BEACH’ by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 2007) is printed by
ON THE RAZZLE by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 1981) is printed by
PIRANDELLO’S HENRY iv by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 2004) is printed
by permission of United Agents llp (www.unitedagents.co.uk).
PROFESSIONAL FOUL by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 1977) is printed by
ROCK ‘N’ ROLL by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 2006) is printed by permis-
ROSENCRANTZ AND GUILDENSTERN ARE DEAD by Tom Stoppard (© Tom
Stoppard 1966) is printed by permission of United Agents llp (www.united-
agents.co.uk).
ROUGH CROSSING by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 1984) is printed by per-
mission of United Agents llp (www.unitedagents.co.uk).
SALVAGE by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 2002) is printed by permission of
SHIPWRECK by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 2002) is printed by permis-
SQUARING THE CIRCLE by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 1984) is printed by
TEETH by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 1967) is printed by permission of
Acknowledgements xvii
THE BOUNDARY by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 1975) is printed by per-

THE CHERRY ORCHARD by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 2009) is printed
THE DISSOLUTION OF DOMINIC BOOT by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard
1964) is printed by permission of United Agents llp (www.unitedagents.
co.uk).
THE DOG IT WAS THAT DIED by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 1982) is
THE FIFTEEN MINUTE HAMLET by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 1976) is
THE HARD PROBLEM by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 2015) is printed by
THE INVENTION OF LOVE by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 1997) is printed
THE REAL INSPECTOR HOUND by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 1968) is
THE REAL THING by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 1982) is printed by per-
THE SEAGULL by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 1997) is printed by permis-
TRAVESTIES by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 1975) is printed by permission
UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 1979) is print-
ed by permission of United Agents llp (www.unitedagents.co.uk).
VOYAGE by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 2002) is printed by permission of
WHERE ARE THEY NOW? By Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 1968) is printed
Permission to quote from the Stoppard plays in the usa, the Philippines and its
Dependencies as detailed in the attached schedule:
A SEPARATE PEACE by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 1966) is printed by

permission of Grove Atlantic (www.groveatlantic.com).
AFTER MAGRITTE by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 1970) is printed by per-
mission of Grove Atlantic (www.groveatlantic.com).
ALBERT’S BRIDGE by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 1969) is printed by per-
ANOTHER MOON CALLED EARTH by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 1967) is
printed by permission of Grove Atlantic (www.groveatlantic.com).
xviii Acknowledgements
ARCADIA by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 1993) is printed by permission of

Grove Atlantic (www.groveatlantic.com).
ARTIST DESCENDING A STAIRCASE by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 1972)
is printed by permission of Grove Atlantic (www.groveatlantic.com).
DALLIANCE by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 1986) is printed by permission
of Grove Atlantic (www.groveatlantic.com).
DARKSIDE by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 2013) is printed by permission
DIRTY LINEN by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 1976) is printed by permis-
sion of Grove Atlantic (www.groveatlantic.com).
DOGG’S HAMLET, CAHOOT’S MACBETH by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard
1979) is printed by permission of Grove Atlantic (www.groveatlantic.com).
ENTER A FREE MAN by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 1968) is printed by
EVERY GOOD BOY DESERVES FAVOUR by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard
HAPGOOD by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 1988) is printed by permission
IF YOU’RE GLAD I’LL BE FRANK by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 1969) is
IN THE NATIVE STATE by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 1991) is printed by
INDIAN INK by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 1995) is printed by permission
IVANOV by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 2008) is printed by permission of
JUMPERS by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 1972) is printed by permission of
LARGO DESOLATO by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 198) is printed by per-
LORD MALQUIST AND MR MOON by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 1966) is
‘M’ IS FOR MOON AMONG OTHER THINGS by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stop-
pard 1964) is printed by permission of Grove Atlantic (www.groveatlantic.
com).
NEUTRAL GROUND by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 1968) is printed by
NEW-FOUND-LAND by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 1976) is printed by
NIGHT AND DAY by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 1978) is printed by per-
Acknowledgements xix
ON ‘DOVER BEACH’ by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 2007) is printed by

ON THE RAZZLE by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 1981) is printed by per-
PIRANDELLO’S HENRY IV by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 2004) is printed
by permission of Grove Atlantic (www.groveatlantic.com).
PROFESSIONAL FOUL by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 1977) is printed by
ROCK ‘N’ ROLL by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 2006) is printed by permis-
ROSENCRANTZ AND GUILDENSTERN ARE DEAD by Tom Stoppard (© Tom
Stoppard 1966) is printed by permission of Grove Atlantic (www.groveatlan-
tic.com).
ROUGH CROSSING by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 1984) is printed by per-
SALVAGE by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 2002) is printed by permission of
SHIPWRECK by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 2002) is printed by permis-
SQUARING THE CIRCLE by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 1984) is printed by
TEETH by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 1967) is printed by permission of
THE BOUNDARY by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 1975) is printed by per-
THE CHERRY ORCHARD by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 2009) is printed
THE DISSOLUTION OF DOMINIC BOOT by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard
THE DOG IT WAS THAT DIED by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 1982) is
THE FIFTEEN MINUTE HAMLET by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 1976) is
THE HARD PROBLEM by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 2015) is printed by
THE INVENTION OF LOVE by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 1997) is printed
THE REAL INSPECTOR HOUND by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 1968) is
THE REAL THING by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 1982) is printed by per-
xx Acknowledgements
THE SEAGULL by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 1997) is printed by permis-

TRAVESTIES by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 1975) is printed by permission
UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 1979) is print-
ed by permission of Grove Atlantic (www.groveatlantic.com).
VOYAGE by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 2002) is printed by permission of
WHERE ARE THEY NOW? By Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 1968) is printed
Permission to quote from the Stoppard papers at the Harry Ransom Center and
the British Library.
From Tango by Slawomir Mrozek (translated by Bethell, N

and adapted by Stoppard, T)
Published by Jonathan Cape
Reprinted by permission of The Random House Group Limited.
Extracts from Some Thoughts On The Russian Personality by Helen Rappaport

are reproduced with the permission of Peters Fraser & Dunlop (www.petersfra-
serdunlop.com) on behalf of Helen Rappaport. Extracts from papers contained
in the Glyndebourne Archives are reproduced with the permission of the ar-
chive of Glyndebourne Productions Ltd. Extracts from manuscripts contained
in the Harry Ransom Center are reproduced with the permission of the Harry
Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin. Extracts from manuscripts
contained in The British Library are reproduced with the permission of The
British Library Board. Extracts from material contained in the library of the
Shakespeare Birthplace Trust are reproduced with the permission of the Col-
lections of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust. Extracts from ‘The Ominousness
of Chekhovian Idyll: The Role of Intertextuality in Stoppard’s The Coast of Uto-
pia’ are reproduced with the permission of Nina Wieda. Extracts from ‘Witt-
genstein’s Language-games, Stoppard’s Building-blocks and context-based
learning in a corpus’ are reproduced with the permission of Sabina Rehman.
Copyright permission to reproduce extracts from Conversations with Stoppard
has been granted by Nick Hern Books, London whose website is www.nick-
hernbooks.co.uk. Extracts from ‘Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness’ in
Journal of Consciousness Studies 2 (3) 1995 are reproduced with the permission
of David Chalmers. Extracts from Dr Aileen Kelly’s works are reproduced with
A cknowledgements xxi
the permission of Dr Aileen Kelly. Extracts from The Love for Three Oranges
are reproduced by permission of Boosey & Hawkes Music Publishers Limited.
My thanks go to: the Royal National Theatre Archive; Dick Mowbray, Clas-
sics Master at Berkhamsted School, for unlocking Housman’s ancient Greek;
Odile Williams, for discovering the source of George Sand’s quotation; The
Bodleian Library and its staff; Victoria Fox of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, llc;
Charlotte King; Keelan Pacot of Grove Atlantic; David Pearce, for teaching
me that drama is conflict; The British Library; John Fleming, for being an en-
thusiastic Stoppard friend for many years and for his constant and invaluable
advice and support and for painstakingly proof reading my manuscript; the
archive of Glyndebourne Productions Ltd, in particular Julia Aries; the Blythe
House Archive & Library and Study Room of the Victoria & Albert Museum,
London; Rose Cobbe and Abigail Darling of United Agents llp, for their kind-
ness and diligence in securing copyright approvals; Brett Savill, for friendship
and encouragement and many shared Stoppardian experiences; Almar (Tring)
Limited, for printing my drafts; Armand Marie Leroi; Blanca Martin, the Librar-
ian, and the staff of the library of St. Edmund Hall, Oxford; Naomi Vanloo, the
Librarian, and the staff of the library of New College, Oxford; the Royal Shake-
speare Company and the Collections of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust; Tim
Kirtley, the Librarian, and the staff of the library of Wadham College, Oxford;
Bob Brace, my neighbour and it angel; the English Faculty Library, Oxford Uni-
versity; John Davison, for kindly reviewing, providing suggestions for improve-
ment and giving me that initial inspiration; James Jackson, for legal advice; the
Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin, and its staff…and my
publisher, Brill Rodopi, for having faith in me when no other publisher did.
Prologue
I am not consciously playing this hand of cards at all. Every play seems a
new start for me.1
stoppard
∵
Despite Stoppard’s assertion that every play is a new start, this book attempts
to provide an overall and unifying pattern in which to assess and evaluate the
whole Stoppardian canon. It is not a revisionist attempt, with the easy benefit
of hindsight, to make all the facts of Stoppard’s works fit a tightly bound intel-
lectual straightjacket. Rather, it is an attempt to provide a framework or, more
accurately, identify the patterns behind a context, not into which all the facts
have to fit but against which the vast expanse of Stoppard’s ideas, themes and
works can be explained, evaluated, compared and followed.
It is a context which must be capable of encompassing the overflowing,
anarchic variety, or plenitude, within Stoppard’s works: Russian intellectual
thought of the nineteenth century, the music of Pink Floyd, the lectures of
Richard Feynman and the plays of Oscar Wilde to name but a few. It must
cover the various media of stage plays, radio plays and a novel plus numerous
interviews and other thoughts of Stoppard ranging over a time period running
from the 1960s to the 2010s.2 Furthermore, it must also allow consideration of
a plethora of ideas like freedom of speech, the nature of God, the source of
morality, romanticism and the concept of fate.
Just as the Chaos Theory which dominates both the ideas and structure of
Arcadia identifies an order out of the apparent chaos of phenomena, so there
are patterns which emerge in Stoppard’s works. There are patterns of method:
1 Stoppard, in an interview with J. Fleming, ‘A Talk With Tom Stoppard’ in Theatre Insight (De-
partment of Theatre and Dance, University of Texas at Austin), Issue 10, volume 5, number
one (December 1993). See also Terry Hodgson who suggested in 2001 that, ‘Stoppard’s future
work may well confound the academic tracer of patterns’. – T. Hodgson, The Plays of Tom
Stoppard, page 13.
2 In 2010 W. Baker and G. Wachs, in Tom Stoppard A Bibliographical History, listed 30 plays
for stage, radio and television, 30 screenplays, 12 adaptations and translations for the stage,
2 works of fiction, 33 published letters, 320 articles, 42 lectures, 519 interviews, 7 audio-visual
materials and 15 unpublished items.
Prologue xxiii
the plays generally comprise some form of stage debate which is based upon
the union of a vehicle and an idea – Jumpers, for example, is a play which ex-
plores two opposing views of the nature of morality through the vehicle of an
academic rehearsing a lecture, entitled ‘Is God?’. Underlying the two-fold na-
ture of the methods is the pattern of themes, the first of which is duality, both
of individuals, such as the two Ruths in Night And Day, and of the persistent
recurrence of examples of illusion and reality, not only in his own creations
but in those of the works Stoppard elects to adapt, such as Dalliance, On the
Razzle and Rough Crossing. Founded upon the bedrock of another duality is
Stoppard’s second main theme, that of ethics; the Stoppardian dichotomy of
moral absolutism and relativism. It flows into such areas as the freedom of
the individual within society, the role of the artist, determinism and the na-
ture of truth. But, the sense of plenitude is reinforced by the operation of a
third pattern: dramatic devices, of theatricality and time shifts. Stoppard em-
ploys across his works just about every conceivable visual and aural effect
from the coin tossing opening of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead to
the wordplay of Travesties to the music of Rock ‘N’ Roll. He also takes enormous
dramatic licence with the concept of time in plays such as Artist Descending a
Staircase, Indian Ink and in The Invention of Love when the action reverberates
back and forth between time periods, often in the same bifurcating manner as
Chaos Theory suggests.
The inaugural London production of The Hard Problem was accompanied
by Bach’s exercise in counterpoint – the Preludes, which to Stoppard are but a
musical metaphor of duality – and the counterpoint to Stoppard’s plenitude is
his application of the principle of parsimony; Occam’s razor. The idea, attrib-
uted to William of Ockham, that when a multiplicity of possible explanations
may be applied to a complicated problem it is usually the simplest one which
provides the most satisfactory answer is the foundation upon which the edi-
fice of the complex arrays of ideas and events that comprise the sensory and
intellectual onslaught of Stoppard’s plays is built. It involves stripping away all
the theatrical devices and Stoppardian methods, thereby reducing, in some
way or other, Stoppard’s core themes to their essence. Various applications of
this reduction of complicated ideas – expressed either verbally or allegorically
through stage events – to a basic issue or argument explain in some way or oth-
er most of the major plays; plays as diverse as The Real Thing, Travesties, Rock
‘N’ Roll and Indian Ink and the vast intellectual patchwork of social behaviour
that is The Coast of Utopia trilogy. Furthermore, the principle of parsimony is
also central to a distinctive feature of Stoppard’s drama – the yoking together
in an unlikely way of disparate subject matters, such as those of spying and
quantum mechanical theory in Hapgood. The manifest plenitude of Stoppard’s
xxiv Prologue
plays belies the broad patterns beneath his drama and, ultimately, the parsi-
mony of Occam’s razor.
Plenitude
The only way I really work is to assemble a strange pig’s breakfast of vi-
sual images and thoughts and try to shake them into some form of coher-
ent pattern.3
stoppard
∵
For Stoppard a visit to the theatre to see one of his plays is an event. The
plenitude of Stoppard is the ‘pig’s breakfast’ to which he admits and is typi-
cally a forthright assault on the aural and visual senses; a plethora of ideas and
wordplay. In most cases the subject matter is wrapped in the paraphernalia of
comedy – Stoppardian audiences rarely fail to laugh, no matter that Stoppard
complained in 2015 that audiences do not get his jokes any more.4
While Stoppard has been heavily influenced by other styles and literary
precedents, he has crafted a distinctive a style all of his own. The allusions
may be stylistic in the form of Night And Day’s Shavian format or the Wildean
and Joycean homage that is Travesties. Shakespeare is repeatedly referenced,
either in quotation, as in the dialogue of Dogg’s Hamlet, Cahoot’s Macbeth
and the title of Undiscovered Country, or, more significantly, in structure and
theme, as in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. While The Real Inspector
Hound is indebted to both Agatha Christie and Sherlock Holmes and Hapgood
to le Carré, Arcadia nods in the direction of Byron, Caroline Lamb and the
Gothic novel. Jumpers acknowledges the debt to Beckett whilst Voyage is, in
part, an evocation of the Chekhovian style which Stoppard was to adapt in
full in his versions of The Cherry Orchard, Ivanov and The Seagull. Stoppard’s
other adaptations invoke authors as diverse as Pirandello, Molnar, Sibleyras
and Mrozek. The Invention of Love is inspired by the poetry of Housman and
3 Stoppard, in an interview with M. Gussow, “Seriousness compromised by my frivolity or…

frivolity redeemed by my seriousness” in M. Gussow, Conversations with Stoppard, page 18.
4 Stoppard, quoted in J. Malvern, Stoppard: ‘They don’t get my jokes any more’ in The Times,
9 February 2015.
Prologue xxv
On ‘Dover Beach’ by Arnold’s while The Dog It Was That Died is derived from
reference to Goldsmith. In Indian Ink/In the Native State one glimpses EM.
Forster and hears Louis MacNeice whereas New-Found-Land provides a taste
of American literature and The Real Thing contains reference to Strindberg
and Ford.
More complex is the myriad of literary references woven into Stoppard’s
texts. In order to get a full appreciation of Stoppard’s argument his audience
must understand the relevance of the phrase ‘Everything can be all right’ in
Every Good Boy Deserves Favour or the significance of quoting both from Virgil’s
Aeneid and Theocritus at the culmination of The Invention of Love. A more
than passing knowledge of Herzen’s From the Other Shore and My Past And
Thoughts will enhance an appreciation of The Coast of Utopia. Likewise, a
study of Sappho’s poetry will illuminate Rock ‘N’ Roll. Conversely, appreciating
what Stoppard left out of his screenplay of Anna Karenina from Tolstoy’s novel
has relevance for Stoppard’s audience to his views on the source of morality.
What he does not translate from Theocritus has significance for the duality
contained in The Invention of Love. Who amongst Stoppard’s audience will
know what Hobson-Jobson is? What is the significance of the Ithaca catechism
to the wordplay of Travesties? Does it matter that Neutral Ground is based upon
Philoctetes, what is the relevance of the name of Septimus’ tortoise in Arcadia
and what is the link between Teeth and Roald Dahl?
The maze of references extends far beyond literature. The audience really
does need to understand the importance of Herzen’s reference to the Decem-
brists in Voyage. Whilst most of Stoppard’s audience probably understands
the references in Jumpers to Captain Oates’ Antarctic sacrifice how many get
the implications of the cricketing references to Bedser and Bradman? A full
appreciation of the baffling briefcase switching scene which opens Hapgood
requires an acquaintance with the mathematical problem of the seven bridges
of Konigsberg. Similarly, it helps to know about Fermat’s last theorem in order
to realise why Thomasina scribbles a margin note in Arcadia. What, indeed, is
the significance of the Ginger Cat in Voyage and Salvage or ‘A Whiter Shade
of Pale’ in The Real Thing and why does Anderson’s catastrophic reversal in
Professional Foul matter?
For a playwright considered by many to be short on characterisation Stop-
pard gives his audience a surprisingly large array of real people. The Coast of
Utopia trilogy is the most obvious example, telling the saga of the Bakunins
and the Herzens and their contemporaries, such as Ogarev, Turgenev and Be-
linsky, in nineteenth century Europe. Travesties yields Tzara, Joyce, Lenin and
a consular official, Henry Carr, whilst two of his plays are based around two
versions of the same poet; Housman in The Invention of Love and Arnold in On
xxvi Prologue
‘Dover Beach’. An appreciation of other plays benefits from a knowledge of real

individuals: Emily Eden in Indian Ink, for example, or the inspiration for Every
Good Boy Deserves Favour, the dissident Victor Fainberg, or even Galileo.
Stoppard’s greatest source of abundance is, above all, the volume and variety
of ideas. What he has described as ‘a fairly complicated intellectual argument’5
characterises plays which encompass the science of Chaos and Newtonian the-
ory in Arcadia, the physics of Einstein and Heisenberg’s quantum mechanics
in Hapgood and David Chalmers’ theory of consciousness in The Hard Problem.
Jumpers and Darkside explore the source of moral values to which The Hard
Problem attempts to apply the concept of value and against which Professional
Foul provides a worked example. Stoppard is passionate about the role of art
which he considers in Artist Descending a Staircase and Travesties. He gives
even more extensive time to an analysis of the role of the individual within so-
ciety as he addresses theories of social and political thought as diverse as those
of Hegel, Schelling, Kant, Rousseau, Marx and the nineteenth century Russian
intelligentsia in The Coast of Utopia, Marx again in Rock ‘N’ Roll and the ethics
of empire in Indian Ink/In the Native State. This leads to a debate about the
freedom of the individual, principally in Every Good Boy Deserves Favour and
Professional Foul and the right to freedom of expression in Night And Day and
Rock ‘N’ Roll and, to a lesser extent, in The Invention of Love. Not satisfied with
simply evaluating what the individual may say one should not be surprised
to see a man as accomplished at the manipulation of words as Stoppard is be
interested in the nature of expression and write a play, Dogg’s Hamlet, Cahoot’s
Macbeth, about Wittgenstein’s theory of language.
The plenitude becomes more diverse and more complex because Stoppard
marries the ideas to theatricality in a test of the physical limits of the stage.
His plays include such devices as a stripper on a swing, acrobats, charades, a
magician and turning the stage into a snowstorm. The inaugural London pro-
duction of The Coast of Utopia made extensive use of a revolving stage and
video projections – Salvage alone required 56 phases.6 With music as varied as
that of The Rolling Stones in Rock ‘N’ Roll, Herman’s Hermits in The Real Thing
and both music hall and Beethoven’s Appassionata Sonata in Travesties – not
to mention the sound of a trumpet falling down a flight of stone stairs in
5 Stoppard, in an interview with R. Hudson, C. Itzin, and S. Trussler, ‘Ambushes for the
Audience: Towards a High Comedy of Ideas’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversa-
tion, page 59.
6 On the video cue sheet – see Salvage, RNT/SM/1/483 Prompt ‘Bible’ Scripts and Production
Notes.
Prologue xxvii
Jumpers – his works cover the full musical panoply. His interest in art does
not end there. Paintings by Duchamp, Poussin, Raphael and Magritte have
all influenced Stoppard’s works and Shipwreck contains a tableau of Manet’s
Dejeuner sur l’herbe. There are walk-on parts for a hare (Jumpers), a tortoise
(one in Jumpers and two in Arcadia), a dog (The Invention of Love) and even a
donkey (The Dog It Was That Died).
And, then there is the comedy. Moon, one of the hapless critics in The Real
Inspector Hound laments, ‘You’re turning it into a complete farce!’,7 which
might equally well describe On the Razzle and Rough Crossing. Stoppard
is home to the donnish jokes of George in Jumpers and the intellectual wit
of Housman and the near pantomime humour of cheap gags, running gags,
numerous double entendres, limericks and malapropisms aplenty. There are
frequent examples of cross purpose and puns too numerous to mention. He
proves to be capable of both satire – in his romp amongst the political classes,
Dirty Linen, and his sending-up of theatre critics in The Real Inspector Hound –
and parody as his pastiche of comic books in Darkside demonstrates.
The plenitude can be intimidating as a Stoppardian audience often has dif-
ficulty in deciding whether to be amused, confused, educated – or all three.
Patterns
I’m discovering the patterns.8

bone, Another Moon Called Earth
∵
The pig’s breakfast, as Stoppard concedes, is intended to form a coherent pat-
tern. The patterns, however, are formed not just within a particular play but
across the plays which is why this book adopts a horizontal view of Stoppard’s
plays and, where relevant, other works, rather than taking a play by play ap-
proach. In the process of so doing it also attempts to explain many of the key
allusions and references.
Rather like the premise of the Chaos Theory in Arcadia there is a pattern
within the theatrical chaos of Stoppard’s plays. His craft can, broadly speaking,
7 The Real Inspector Hound, page 43.

8 Another Moon Called Earth, page 59.
xxviii Prologue
be summarised in three categories:9 methods – first, the stage debate and, sec-
ondly, the manner by which he integrates the vehicle of each play with the
ideas they present; the dominant themes – of both ethics and duality (with
a particular emphasis on illusion and reality); and, the devices – of theatrical-
ity, which despite its role in creating the froth of plenitude contains patterns of
its own, and of time shifts.
Stoppard acknowledges that his plays generally contain some form of
stage debate – ‘I have written plays which are more in the nature of an argu-
ment between ideas, or an argument between people who have different views
over a particular abstract question’.10 In virtually all cases he does not express
his own opinion which leads to what looks like contradictions. As he reveals,
‘…there’s that line in Walt Whitman which, when I first came across it, rang all
kinds of bells for me: “Do I contradict myself? – Very well, I contradict myself”’.11
There is rarely a message to preach. Instead, the audience, having been present-
ed with both sides of the argument is, generally, left to make its own mind up.
But, the arguments behind the ideas can be better illustrated if they are
cloaked in the vestments of a vehicle which demonstrates in dramatic form the
subjects under discussion. The plot of Professional Foul, for instance, hinges on
a worked example of a moral dilemma that the play is exploring. The structure
of Arcadia reflects the Chaos Theory that the play presents as one explanation
of natural phenomena. In Hapgood the spying plot is the narrative overlaid
upon a consideration of the duality inherent in quantum mechanical theory.
A discussion about determinism occurs in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are
Dead which is a mirror image of a Shakespearean play about destiny.
Throughout most of Stoppard’s works the recurrent theme is that of duality
which manifests itself structurally in the two sides of a stage debate and in the
fusion of the vehicle of a Stoppard play to its underlying idea. Stoppard’s great-
est metaphor for duality is that of illusion and reality. At its heart Stoppard’s
world is a moral landscape which is divided in two; the on-going debate about
morality is whether it is absolute or relative. It is the perspective in the latter
which accounts for the difference between illusion and reality. Hence, the two
great themes running through Stoppard’s plays are inextricably linked. Thus,
one is presented with the ambiguity of the opening scene of The Real Thing,
9 Jim Hunter identifies three elements – brilliant language, absurd yet inspired theatrical
ideas, and an intellectual frame of reference – see J. Hunter, Tom Stoppard Faber Critical
Guides, page 4.
10 Stoppard, in an interview with J. Mustich, Barnes & Noble Review, 2 February 2009.
11 Stoppard, in conversation with P. Wood, programme notes to 1976 production of Jumpers
at the Royal National Theatre.
Prologue xxix
with the split personalities of Elizabeth Hapgood, Herzen, Arnold and Hous-
man and with the bilateral nature of one of Stoppard’s most frequently occur-
ring phenomena, the play-within-a-play.
For Stoppard ‘The text is a means towards an event’12 and the theatrical-
ity of the event both surrounds and enhances the intellectual content. He is
producing an evening out, not a lecture, the consequence of which may be a
series of coin tosses with a highly unlikely outcome or a curiously perceptive
Secretary losing her garments. But, even both the comedy and theatricality can
be categorised into patterns. This is especially so when considering the impact
of the main literary influences on Stoppard – in particular, Shakespeare, Beck-
ett and Chekhov. The theatricality is designed, in part, to keep the audience
in their seats. Notice how a Stoppard play usually commences with an arrest-
ing opening scene. It is no accident that so many plays involve a mystery: not
just a murder mystery, as in The Real Inspector Hound, but the mystery of why
Anderson is going to Prague or whether there really was a second painting of
Flora Crewe. The impact is both visual – ranging from boating down the Styx
to a display of the night sky – and aural, such as a car chase relayed via walkie-
talkie radios and the beating sound of helicopter rotor blades.
The theatricality can be part of the vehicle: as the Prisoner in The Gamblers
puts it, ‘It’s a bit dramatic – isn’t it’.13 It is no coincidence that Jumpers, a play
about moral gymnastics, contains a troupe of acrobats. The theatricality also
enhances the argument. The rhymed advice that Alexander gives to Sacha in
Every Good Boy Deserves Favour mimics the mnemonics Russian prisoners of
conscience used. Manet’s Dejeuner sur l’herbe is reminiscent of a scene in one
of Herzen’s political essays. Much of the music performs similar roles. In Dark-
side Stoppard uses extracts from Pink Floyd’s music to underline points in the
dialogue while in Arcadia he uses the waltz as a visual proxy for deterministic
chaos.
On occasions Stoppard also employs within his plays a series of time shifts
which are best summed up by his own observation that, ‘It’s back and forth
in time’.14 The oscillations of time permit Stoppard the luxury of revisiting or
recapitulating arguments and positions or changing the perspective. Thus, in
12 Stoppard, in an interview with K. Kelly and W. Demastes, ‘The Playwright and the
rofessors: An Interview With
P Tom Stoppard’ in South Central Review, Volume 11,
Number 4, Winter 1994.
13 The Gamblers, page 3.
14 Stoppard, in an interview with K. Kelly and W. Demastes, ‘The Playwright and the
Professors: An Interview With
Tom Stoppard’ in South Central Review, Volume 11,
Number 4, Winter 1994.
xxx Prologue
Indian Ink/In the Native State the ethics of Empire can be debated from both
the standpoint of England and India and pre- and post-colonial periods. The
intellectual debate in the first act of Travesties is also enhanced by the repeated
opportunities to cover the ground from slightly different perspectives. Time
shifts also permit Stoppard to fuse the idea and the vehicle of his plays more
tightly. The oscillations of time in Arcadia reflect the bifurcations of the Chaos
process while the old and the young Housmans enable Stoppard to underline
the duality of his character.
That is not to say that each of his plays can be reduced to a simple formula.
One will not necessarily find each theme or attribute in every play. But, at the
bottom of all Stoppard’s plays, it must never be forgotten, are the voluminous
and varied outpourings of a single mind and across the totality of his work
there is an underlying recurrence of ideas, methods and devices which exhibit
a consistency of thought.
Parsimony
There is no safe point around which everything takes its proper place, so
that you see things flat and see how they relate to each other.15
stoppard
∵
It is the contention of this book that, in contrast to Stoppard’s statement that
there is no fulcrum to his output, there is an eye in the Stoppardian theatrical
vortex which appears in most of the major plays: an application of a device of
parsimony known as Occam’s razor. It is a process of elimination which reduc-
es arguments to their bare essence based upon the concept that when faced
with a range of possible explanations for a complex problem or situation it is
usually the simplest one which prevails. The use of the principle of parsimony
removes all the Stoppardian plenitude – the fizz of the theatricality and the
complexity of the intellectual ping-pong – so that the audience is left with the
core of Stoppard’s argument.
15 Stoppard, in an interview with R. Hayman, ‘Second Interview’ in R. Hayman, Tom

S toppard, page 144.
Prologue xxxi
The effect of the process of the parsimony principle is the removal of all
extraneous information and is, therefore, one of reduction to simplicity.16
It is, perhaps, most obvious in The Fifteen Minute Hamlet, Stoppard’s two-stage
reduction of Shakespeare’s Hamlet to its key events. The end product of the
application of parsimony is frequently a speech; often a concluding one. Carr’s
semi-amnesic statement at the end of Travesties is one such example, Herzen’s
argument for the chance of history at the end of Salvage is another. Neverthe-
less, Henry’s analysis of the essence of The Real Thing demonstrates that the
key summation need not necessarily be the play’s final one. The parsimony,
however, need not even be a speech. In Rock ‘N’ Roll it is a song. In Indian Ink/In
the Native State it is a painting. In The Hard Problem it is an altruistic decision
by Hilary.
Occam’s razor may be applied in several ways and Stoppard’s works make
use of the variety. Jumpers is an example of its application in a metaphysical
manner to an argument. Most of the other applications are methodological –
The Invention of Love, Travesties and The Coast of Utopia stand out. One of
Stoppard’s plays, After Magritte, shows the process of parsimony in three
worked examples: first, explaining an unusual situation (the opening scene)
with its only possible solution; secondly, creating an unusual situation (the
closing scene) out of a unique combination of actions; and, thirdly, the op-
eration of the application of parsimony to a range of possible explanations
to resolve another unusual scene all witnessed and interpreted differently by
the passers-by. A similarly parsimonious solution to a conundrum of situation
may be found in the dramatic vignette that is Stoppard’s co-written play, The
Boundary.
The process of parsimony also explains how Stoppard writes and thinks
by juxtaposing what, at face value, are unlikely unions of ideas and vehicles.
There is only one way they can fit together. Probably the best example is how
he presents the arguments of Chaos theory and Newtonian physics against the
background of a story about the supplanting of a garden built along classical
principles with one of a Romantic concept. The action of Occam’s razor also
accounts for how he unites the poems of Sappho and the music of Syd Barrett
16 John Fleming also emphasises Stoppard’s reduction to simplicity: ‘What is noteworthy is

the manner in which Stoppard executes his ideas, the ways in which he uses metaphors
to make the complex comprehensible. These intellectual ideas, which are difficult but
which also have a more simple level to them, are expressed not only via artful language
and complex dramatic structures but also through engaging staging elements that are as
theatrically stimulating as they are entertaining’. – J. Fleming, Stoppard’s Theatre Finding
Order amid Chaos, page 246.
xxxii Prologue
in Rock ‘N’ Roll or the action of brain consciousness and financial markets in
The Hard Problem. Who else would have forced together the works of Joyce
into the structure of a play by Wilde in a debate about whether an artist can
be a revolutionary? In many cases it explains how the vehicle and the idea of
a play are interwoven.
By applying the principle of parsimony to the majority of Stoppard’s main
plays one arrives at the concept of Occam’s razor itself. It is, therefore, with
Occam’s razor that one should begin this analysis of Stoppard’s canon before
examining the patterns behind the plenitude.
…
…there is a pattern, a chaotic system isn’t really random, it just looks
random.17
amal, The Hard Problem
17 The Hard Problem, page 25.

chapter 1
Occam’s Razor
Occam’s Razor
I think you owe us all an explanation1

foot, After Magritte
∵
If anything can be said to be the keystone in the arch of a general thesis of
Stoppardianism it is Occam’s razor or, as it is otherwise known, the principle
of parsimony. William of Ockham was a fourteenth century (c. 1288–13472)
English Franciscan friar. In 1324 he was summoned by Pope John xxii to Avi-
gnon where he concluded, in a controversy over the concept of ‘apostolic
property’ between his order and the papacy, that the Pope was in heresy. He
subsequently fled Avignon in 1328 and lived for the rest of his life in Munich
where he enjoyed the protection of the Holy Roman Emperor, Louis of Bavar-
ia. During his exile in Munich he composed most of his political writings and
died an excommunicant.3 He certainly did not invent the razor. Many philoso-
phers before him discussed the idea – for instance, Aristotle, who said: ‘God
and nature do nothing that is pointless’.4 However, he has given his name to the
concept known as Occam’s razor.5 The razor is frequently expressed as ‘beings
(or entities) should not be multiplied beyond necessity’.6 In fact, there is no
1 After Magritte, page 72.

2 PV. Spade, The Cambridge Companion to Ockham, page 1. See also R. Keele, Ockham Explained
From Razor To Rebellion, page 175.
3 PV. Spade, The Cambridge Companion to Ockham, page 3.
4 Aristotle, On The Heavens i.4, quoted in R. Keele, Ockham Explained From Razor To Rebellion,
page 91.
5 R. Wood, ‘Ockham’s Repudiation of Pelagianism’ in PV. Spade, The Cambridge Companion to
Ockham, page 358.
6 PV. Spade, ‘Ockham’s Nominalist Metaphysics: Some Main Themes’ in PV. Spade, The Cam-
bridge Companion to Ockham, page 101.
© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ��7 | doi 10.1163/9789004319653_002

2 CHAPTER 1
record that he said exactly that.7 He used other ways to express what is now con-
sidered to be equivalent to the conventionally accepted form of the razor – viz:
Plurality is not to be posited without necessity.8

What can happen through fewer (principles) happens in vain through
more.9
When a proposition is verified of things, more (things) are superfluous if
fewer suffice.10
There are many forms of the razor, but they can be broadly classified as two
kinds: methodological, which presumes to explain the correct method by
which to select the most likely explanation of a problem or situation from a
universe of otherwise attractive theories; and, metaphysical, which presumes
to explain the metaphysical simplicity of the world.11 The principle of parsi-
mony has a logical dual, or anti-razor: the principle of plenitude, which is the
razor in its reciprocal form. Ockham and his razor is a philosophical subject in
its own right and commentators, rightly, insist upon very precise definitions.
However, in common parlance the French spelling of Occam seems to be more
commonly used and the idea that one should prefer the simplest explanation
to a variety of possible explanations of a puzzle (ie: the methodological razor)
seems to be the most common – if, technically, semantically and philosophi-
cally incorrect – understanding of the principle of parsimony.12
William’s concept has been applied variously throughout history to aspects
of science, physics, chemistry, biology, medicine, religion, philosophy and pro
bability theory. Interestingly, a number of individuals who have concerned
themselves with Occam’s razor have also been of interest to Stoppard: Richard
Feynman (in his consideration of quantum mechanics);13 Isaac Newton, who
stated that, ‘We are to admit to no more causes of natural things than such as
7 See reference to A. Maurer, ‘Ockham’s Razor and Chatton’s Anti-Razor’ in Mediaeval Stud-
ies, 46, 463–475 1984 quoted in in PV. Spade, The Cambridge Companion to Ockham, pages
101 and 113.
8 William of Ockham, i Libros Sententiarum i, Prol I/I.30.2 and Quodlibeta septem VI.10.
9 William of Ockham, i Libros Sententiarum i, Prol I.17.3/I.26.1/I26.2/II.12–13.
10 William of Ockham, Quodlibeta septem, VII.8.
11 See R. Keele, Ockham Explained From Razor To Rebellion, page 92 for an explanation of
these classifications.
12 See R. Keele, Ockham Explained From Razor To Rebellion, especially Chapter 5.
13 I. Duck and ECG. Sudarshan, 100 Years of Planck’s Quantum, page 472 – ‘Feynman solved
(a) problem by application of Occam’s razor’.
Occam’s Razor 3
are both true and sufficient to explain their differences’;14 and, Galileo, who
represented the principle in his Dialogue: ‘Nature does not multiply things
unnecessarily’.15 In essence, Occam’s razor can be reduced to the idea that
‘other things being equal – the simplest hypothesis proposed as an explana-
tion of phenomena is more likely to be the true one than is any other available
hypothesis’.16
Stoppard and Occam’s Razor
Occam’s razor is a good instinct.17

stoppard
∵
In so far as it is a process which reduces an entity to its bare essence the appli-
cation of the principle of parsimony is not dissimilar to the way Shakespeare
takes the person of King Lear and reduces him to his quintessential self:
Is man no more than this? Consider him well.…Thou art the thing itself;
unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal
as thou art.18
What Shakespeare does to the human entity is largely what Stoppard does to
ideas or arguments or complex issues in his plays – except that in Stoppard’s
case the process rarely takes either a linear or direct form. The very nature
of his plays, in which his ideas and arguments are usually intricately interwo-
ven into the vehicles of his plays, coupled with dramatic devices such as cha-
otic theatricality, time shifts and a view of a subject which often comes from
an unusual perspective precludes such an easy application of the principle
14 Isaac Newton, The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, vol ii, page 202.
15 Galileo, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, page 397.
16 R. Swinburne, Simplicity As Evidence of Truth, page 1.
17 Stoppard, in an interview with W. Mortimer, in the programme of the 2015 production of
Hapgood at the Hampstead Theatre.
18 King Lear, Act iii, scene iv, lines 97–102.
4 CHAPTER 1
of parsimony.19 With Stoppard the process can often work in reverse, too –
building the puzzle up rather than resolving it. In Stoppard’s plays both the
playwright and his audience have to do a lot of work.20
Stoppard is well aware of Occam’s razor and the impact it has on his work. In
an interview with Nigel Farndale in 2010 he said, ‘I’m not a theoretician about
playwriting but I have a strong sense that plays have to be pitched, the scene,
the line, the word, at the exact point where the audience has just the right
amount of information. It’s like Occam’s razor’.21 This is not the first time Stop-
pard has expounded such a view or, at least, something which is clearly closely
derived from an interpretation of Occam’s razor. Shortly after The Real Thing
was first performed, in 1982, Stoppard was interviewed by Brian Firth and the
interview was published in a literary magazine, Strawberry Fare.22 Stoppard
was quoted as saying, ‘What sophistication I pretend to usually takes the form
of resolving various complex versions of the world and arriving at a really
simple view of the world’.23 Only a few years afterwards, during rehearsals for
Hapgood he recognised how the problem in the work of others related to that
of his own: ‘I watched a documentary about Crick and Watson’s discovery of
the structure of dna – the double helix. There was only one way all the infor-
mation they had could fit but they couldn’t figure out what it was. I felt the
same (about rewriting part of Hapgood)’.24 This theme is similarly reflected in
19 Kenneth Tynan summarised the issue with his comment that, ‘Simplicity of thought …
quite often underlies complexity of style’. – K. Tynan, Withdrawing with Style from Chaos.
John Fleming makes a similar point about simplicity, but juxtaposed against the overall
play rather than Stoppard’s style: ‘While Stoppard’s plays are known for their complexity,
their fundamental theses are often rather simple’. – J. Fleming, Stoppard’s Theatre Finding
Order amid Chaos, page 245.
20 Stoppard’s expectations of his audience reflect what he admires in Hemingway. He said,
in ‘Reflections on Ernest Hemingway’, page 4, that ‘It seems to me that Hemingway’s
achievement whether calculated or instinctive, was to get his effects by making the reader
do the work’.
21 Stoppard, in an interview with N. Farndale, The Telegraph, 19 January 2010.
22 Stoppard, in an ‘Interview with Brian Firth’ in W. Baker and A. Smothers (ed), ‘The Real
Thing’ Essays on Tom Stoppard in Celebration of his 75th Birthday, page 8.
23 Stoppard, in an ‘Interview with Brian Firth’ in W. Baker and A. Smothers (ed), ‘The Real
Thing’ Essays on Tom Stoppard in Celebration of his 75th Birthday, page 10.
24 Stoppard, in an interview with S. Guppy, ‘Tom Stoppard: The Art of Theater vii’ in
P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stoppard in Conversation, page 178. W. Demastes notices the same
point – see Theatre Of Chaos, page 42.
Occam’s Razor 5
Stoppard’s article on James Thurber in which he refers to what he calls Thurb-

er’s speciality – ‘the fantasy with the logical explanation’.25
The application of the parsimony principle is not visible in every play that
has been formed by Stoppard’s mind and this book both acknowledges that
observation and does not seek to retrofit a theory which does not apply onto
every one of Stoppard’s works. Moreover, Stoppard’s canon contains a large
number of adaptations of other playwright’s works and searching for evidence
of parsimony in those works where Stoppard is not the originator of the play
garners very thin pickings. Nevertheless, in very nearly all of the major stage
plays and in many of his other works there is noticeable evidence of the ap-
plication of the form of reduction credited to Occam, either in terms of a play’s
structure or its argument. Intriguingly, even Stoppard’s normal method of writ-
ing a play seems to conform to a process which is analogous to the application
of the razor.
Occam’s Razor Applied Structurally
Occam’s razor was present in Stoppard’s thinking right in the earliest days of
his playwriting. When he was interviewed by Mel Gussow in April 1972 Stop-
pard was asked about the genesis of After Magritte. He responded, ‘I went to
see a man who had two peacocks.26 They tend to run away. He was shaving one
morning and he looked out the window and saw a peacock leap over the hedge
into the road. Expensive animals, peacocks, so he threw down his razor and
ran out and caught the peacock and brought it back home. I had been looking
for a short piece and I had some vague idea of what I wanted to do. I didn’t
write about the man or the peacock but about two people who just go by, and,
boom, they see this man in his pyjamas, with bare feet, shaving foam on his
face, carrying a peacock. They see this man for five-eighths of a second – and
that’s what I write about’.27
25 J. Fleming, ‘Tom Stoppard: A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man’, in W. Baker and
A. Smothers (ed), ‘The Real Thing’ Essays on Tom Stoppard in Celebration of his 75th Birth-
day, page 40 (quoted from Stoppard, ‘Double Focus’, page 8).
26 See P. Delaney, Tom Stoppard The Moral Vision of The Major Plays, note 21, page 162 for an
analysis of the various versions of the peacock story.
27 Stoppard, in an interview with M. Gussow, ‘Writing dialogue is the only respectable way
of contradicting yourself’ in M. Gussow, Conversations with Stoppard, page 7.
6 CHAPTER 1
It was actually in Jumpers that Stoppard did just that. The stage directions
for the moment when George opens the door to Bones, the policeman, read
thus:
The door is opened to him by a man holding a bow-and-arrow in one hand

and a tortoise in the other, his face covered in shaving foam. BONES recoils
from the spectacle…28
It is Bones’ perspective that matters.29 It is worth noting, in the context of

Occam’s razor, that just as Stoppard looks at situations from an unusual per-
spective30 and unravels them so, in a similar vein, he also presents situations
based around their less obvious participants and builds up a narrative which,
complicated because of its unexpected perspective, also requires explanation.
Michael Coveney noticed the point:
The elevation of footnotes in cultural history is all part of Stoppard’s hu-

manist instinct as a writer. He installs pride in people’s identity, moves
them centre stage, be they Rosencrantz and Guildenstern,31 or the minor
28 Jumpers, page 43.

29 Stoppard sees this ‘trick’ (as he refers to it) repeating in his work, although his interest
appears to be in its dramatic effect. ‘Rosencrantz and Guildenstern is about Hamlet as
seen by two people driving past Elsinore. It’s a favourite thing of mine: the idea of an
absolutely bizarre image which has a total rationale to it being seen by different people.
And everybody is absolutely certain about what they see. There are tiny bits of that in
Jumpers: a man carrying a tortoise in one hand and a bow and arrow in the other, his
face covered in shaving foam. A trick I enjoy very much is when, bit by bit, you build
up something ludicrous – and then someone walks in’ – Stoppard, in an interview with
M. G ussow, ‘Writing dialogue is the only respectable way of contradicting yourself’ in
M. Gussow, Conversations with Stoppard, pages 7–8.
30 Michael Billington comments on Travesties, ‘What is significant is Stoppard’s delight –
as in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern – in glimpsing major events from the sidelong per-
spective of someone only marginally involved with them’. – M. Billington, Stoppard: the
playwright, page 98. Anthony Jenkins also comments on Stoppard’s alternative sense of
perception: ‘Stoppard does share a kinship with (Magritte). Both of them question the
nature of perception’. – A. Jenkins, The Theatre of Tom Stoppard, page 56.
31 Irving Wardle’s review of the first production of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
by the Royal National Theatre in 1967 underlines Coveney’s point: ‘From the labyrinthine
picture of Elsinore Mr Stoppard has blown up a single detail and wrenched enough ma-
terial from it to create a drama’. – The Times, 12 April 1967. H. Sudkamp also observes
the point in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead: ‘Stoppard exchanges periphery and
centre’. – Tom Stoppard’s Biographical Drama, page 329.
Occam’s Razor 7
British consular official Henry Carr in Travesties, or Flora Crewe who

apparently just failed to sit for Modigliani, or poor old insignificant and
cuckolded Ezra Chater.32
Perhaps that is what interested Stoppard in adapting a book to the screenplay

of Empire of the Sun in which the story of the Japanese invasion of China in
World War ii is seen through the eyes of a small boy, Jamie Graham. Stoppard’s
linking narrative for the Glyndebourne Opera’s production of a concert ver-
sion of The Merry Widow provides an insight into Stoppard’s approach. The
traditional libretto struck him, according to Michael Billington as ‘both convo-
luted and illogical’.33 Stoppard continues:
Initially there was a suggestion of making Baron Zeta, the head of the
Pontevedrian legation in Paris, the narrator of events. But that wouldn’t
work since the story depends on the Baron’s belief that his wife is carry-
ing on an illicit affaire with a young officer – Zeta gets it all wrong but you
can’t have a narrator who is both deluded and apparently omniscient at
the same time.34
Billington explains: ‘The answer, Stoppard decided, was to make Njegus, an em-
bassy secretary who has a marginal part in the action, the on-stage narrator’.35
Stoppard adds, ‘We’ll see Njegus talking about past events in which he imag-
ines he is the principal player and everyone else is secondary: he believes he
is the centre of a drama called The Confidential Secretary in which the Merry
Widow constantly got in the way’.36 If all this sounds very familiar to the audi-
ence of Travesties it is because, as Stoppard admits, it is. ‘It doesn’t take too
sharp an eye’, he concedes, ‘to spot that it’s very like my own play, Travesties,
in which Henry Carr, who was a minor consular official in Zurich in 1917, saw
Lenin, Joyce and Tristan Tzara as incidental to his personal story’.37
32 M. Coveney, in The Observer 18 April 1993.

33 M. Billington, ‘Prima Le Parole?’ in the Glyndebourne Festival Opera programme 1993,
page 65.
34 Stoppard, in an interview with Billington, M – quoted in ‘Prima Le Parole?’ in the Glynde-
bourne Festival Opera programme 1993, page 65.
35 M. Billington, ‘Prima Le Parole?’ in the Glyndebourne Festival Opera programme 1993,
page 65.
36 Stoppard, in an interview with M. Billington, quoted in ‘Prima Le Parole?’ in the Glynde-
37 Stoppard, in an interview with M. Billington, quoted in ‘Prima Le Parole?’ in the Glynde-
8 CHAPTER 1
After Magritte is a triple version of the Occam’s razor principle – that in a

complicated situation or argument, of all the plethora of possible explanations
that could exist it is the simplest that is the most likely to satisfy.38 It offers a
tantalising insight into the way Stoppard’s mind works as he demonstrates in
the play Occam’s principle: both backward looking (its usual form) and forward
looking (in the act of construction) and in the act of operation. The opening
scene39 requires a most precise set of stage directions to set up a surreal scene
in a room, with furniture piled up against the front door, in which a woman in
a ball gown is crawling around on the floor, a man in fishing waders and black
evening dress trousers is blowing into a lampshade which is suspended on a
rope counterbalanced by a bowl of fruit and an old lady is lying on her back on
an ironing board. A policeman is gaping at the scene through a window. Both
he and the audience are effectively invited to come up with an explanation
for the scene; in other words, to apply Occam’s razor retrospectively to come
up with the most plausible answer.40 The audience is in the same position as
38 Michael Billington gets very close to the concept of Occam’s razor when he writes, ‘Stop-
pard’s After Magritte is based on a straightforward proposition: that behind the most bi-
zarre, unlikely, surreal image there is often a logical explanation’. – M. Billington, Stop-
pard: the playwright, page 77. Jeffrey Mason describes After Magritte as, ‘an apparent
chaos which finally submits to the tidy explanations that we all cherish but which Stop-
pard knows are impossible’. – J. Mason, ‘Footprints to the Moon: Detectives as Suspects in
Hound and Magritte’ in J. Harty iii (ed), Tom Stoppard A Casebook, page 118.
39 Anthony Jenkins ascribes Stoppard’s inspiration for this scene to Magritte’s L’Assassin
menace – A. Jenkins, The Theatre of Tom Stoppard, page 55.
40 John Bull notices the structure of the tableau but sees in it a paradigm for another Stop-
pardian trait – the fusion of unlikely themes: ‘Detective Inspector Foot seeks to explain
the opening tableau, announcing a series of increasingly bizarre theories that are capped
only by the real explanation. What is here used playfully, elsewhere in Stoppard’s work
takes on more serious dimensions.…From Stoppard’s very earliest work, audiences were
drawn into worlds that declared themselves as rationally coherent, even as the events
of the plays set out to demolish the evidence. This dualistic structuring is reflected in
the way in which Stoppard balances and opposes thematic material in his plays: clas-
sicism and romanticism; imagination and science; free-will and determinism; and so
on’. – J. Bull, ‘Tom Stoppard and politics’ in K. Kelly (ed), The Cambridge Companion to
Tom Stoppard, page 136. CWE. Bigsby remarks upon Stoppard’s resolution of seemingly
bizarre scenes in both After Magritte and Jumpers: ‘The apparent absurdity of the open-
ing scene (of Jumpers) during which a stripper flies across the stage on a trapeze, Dotty
flounders her way through a bewildering melody of “moon” songs, and the yellow uni-
formed gymnasts perform their feats until the death of one of their number precipitates
an abrupt end, resembles the bizarre opening of After Magritte. Indeed, as in that play,
these impossibly incongruous elements are shown to be capable of a perfectly ratio-
nal explanation; but whereas in the earlier work Stoppard was largely content with his
Occam’s Razor 9
Bones or the two people who saw the man holding the peacock. Entirely in
keeping with the principle of Occam’s razor, of the many possible answers to
display of ingenuity, here the unravelling of confusions is endemic to the style and pur-
pose of the play’s protagonist’. – CWE. Bigsby, Tom Stoppard, page 23.
Daniel Jernigan has noticed the same Stoppardian trait but applies it to his conten-
tion that, ‘Stoppard’s career is dominated by a commitment to “Bucking the Postmodern”,
to critiquing and rejecting postmodern attitudes at every turn.…(It) has followed a tra-
jectory that runs counter to that of the 20th century generally, moving in turn from the
postmodernism of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1967) to the modernism
of The Real Thing (1984) to the realism of The Coast of Utopia (2002) and Rock “N” Roll
(2002)’. – DK. Jernigan, Tom Stoppard Bucking the Postmodern, page 1. Jernigan deduces
from the resolution of the puzzles of the Magrittean tableaux in After Magritte part of his
argument for Stoppard defying postmodernity and ascribes to it the resolution of con-
flicting local perspectives with universal ones – eg: ‘(Stoppard’s) tendency to discredit
locally held beliefs in favour of more universally shared ones helps to explain a number
of similar nonsensical images found throughout the play’. (op cit, page 41). Jernigan ap-
pears to suggest that what I call one of Stoppard’s methods of applying Occam’s razor is
what he calls the empirical method – eg: ‘Stoppard’s response to a Magrittean perspective
of the world is to make sense of it, as each of the various visual anomalies is made sense
of within the context of a larger narrative…After Magritte doesn’t just privilege coher-
ence, but also privileges the idea that the empirical method helps to yield such coherence
(and…the empirical method is privileged time and again during Stoppard’s career)’. (op
cit, page 32). Whilst Jernigan is correct in noticing that Stoppard repeats this technique
his interpretation fails to recognise that the technique Stoppard is employing throughout
many of his plays is the application of Occam’s razor to resolve complex questions to
their simplest, and most satisfactory, solutions. ‘Stoppard strives to instill a homogene-
ity of thought. Everyone in the audience is to agree that Inspector Foot was the impetus
behind the strange scene witnessed by Thelma and Harris. Everyone in the audience is
also to agree that the opening and closing Magrittean images can be rationally explained.
Thus, Stoppard doesn’t encourage the factional disagreement that…is the very mark of
the postmodern era and is part and parcel of the proliferation of local narratives. Rather
after Magritte has left the building, Stoppard steps in to encourage his audience to leave
the theatre with epistemological and ontological attitudes that are so steeped in empiri-
cism that they actually defy postmodernity. According to this reading, After Magritte be-
comes a veritable guidebook, designed to help people see through heterotopias in such a
way that they can make sense of them according to more traditional and epistemological
and ontological perspectives.…this theatrical technique will show up again in Stoppard’s
work, in Jumpers, but even more tellingly in Arcadia and Indian Ink, as situations that, on
their surface entail empirical conundrums resolve themselves in such a way that episte-
mological stability is maintained’. – DK. Jernigan, Tom Stoppard Bucking the Postmodern,
pages 41–42. Jernigan also refers to the process of the empirical method as ‘normaliza-
tion’. (eg: see op cit, pages 32, 42, 164 (Jernigan cites the penknife incident in Voyage as an
example of Stoppard’s normalization process) and 171 (the Dejeuner sur l’herbe tableau
in Shipwreck)).
10 CHAPTER 1
the puzzle the correct one is of ‘a mundane and domestic nature bordering
on a cliché’.41 The man, Harris, and his wife, Thelma, are about to go ball-
room dancing. The light has just blown and Harris is attempting to replace it
whilst insulating himself from possible shock by wearing the nearest rubber
insulation he has to hand. The counterweight to the light, a porcelain bowl
containing 150 lead slugs from a .22 calibre pistol, has cracked necessitating a
replacement weight – the fruit bowl which was to hand – and Thelma is crawl-
ing around on the floor, having moved the furniture out of the way, trying to
collect the spilt slugs. Meanwhile, Harris’ mother, who is staying with them,
has been receiving massage on her troublesome back on the most convenient
flat surface which could be found, the ironing board on which Thelma was
about to iron Harris’ dress shirt.
Of course, one tableau puzzle was never going to be enough for Stoppard
and After Magritte delivers two more. The second puzzle demonstrates Oc-
cam’s principle in action and concerns the reason why the policeman has
turned up at Harris’ house in the first place; a suspicion that his car was
used in the getaway of a robbery. After Thelma and Harris have taken his
mother to a Magritte exhibition all three of them see a one legged man in
the street, wearing a striped shirt, carrying something and holding a stick, as
they are driving away. This time Stoppard produces the confusion of possible
explanations of the scene they see. Thelma believes she saw a bearded, one
legged footballer in a striped football shirt carrying a football and an ivory
cane. To Harris he was an old man with a white beard, dressed in pyjamas,
carrying a tortoise and a white stick. Harris’ mother provides a third version:
she believes it was a man wearing a prisoner’s uniform carrying a handbag
and a cricket bat, playing hopscotch. Then Stoppard applies Occam’s razor
and delivers the answer. The man is none other than Inspector Foot who had
overslept and did not want to get a parking ticket. With a migraine overcom-
ing him as he was half way through shaving he had pulled up his pyjamas
in a hurry (putting both feet into the same leg), grabbing his wife’s handbag
(which contained change for the parking meter) and her parasol to keep off
the rain.
Stoppard finishes the play by showing Occam’s razor in reverse – the
forward looking creation of the puzzle. As events in the play proceed Stop-
pard develops – piece by piece, over a period of time and not always in such a
way that the ultimate significance of a particular action is obvious – the

Occam’s Razor 11
constituent parts of the final tableau: Harris is trying to prove a point by

demonstrating that a blind man can balance on one leg; Foot dons his
sunglasses because of a migraine, having taken his sock off to enable a hot bulb
to be held as it is changed, and eats a banana, on Mother’s advice, as it is good
for headaches; the tuba playing Mother is trying to change the light bulb, using
the chair and table to reach, whilst trying to avoid standing on one of her feet
which she earlier burnt (on an iron); Thelma searches on the floor for a needle
she has dropped, having removed her dress to adjust the hem. As the lightbulb
is changed the set goes dark until the light is switched back on. The closing
image the audience is left with is of Inspector Foot, in dark glasses, with one
sock off, eating a banana, Harris ‘gowned, blindfolded with a cushion over his
head, arms outstretched, on one leg, counting’,42 Thelma crawling around the
floor in her underwear and Harris’ mother standing on one foot, on a chair
placed on a table, with a sock on one hand and playing the tuba. All the while
the lampshade is slowly descending (because Foot has removed the banana
from the counterweight). As Harris has noted earlier, encapsulating the ap-
plication of Occam’s razor, ‘There is obviously a perfectly logical reason for
everything’.43
The process by which Stoppard creates problems and then resolves them
in a method that adapts the principle of parsimony is, to some extent, a self-
conscious one. In a comment concerning the origin of Artist Descending a
Staircase Stoppard reveals the internal creative and intellectual process by
which he creates the puzzle and then reveals the answer using Occam’s razor:
I had this thought about this tape gag where we play a tape at the begin-
ning and 75 minutes later we’d peg it off by showing that the whole thing
had been, as it were, misinterpreted. So there was the need for 74 minutes
of padding or brilliant improvisation, if you like, or very carefully struc-
tured and meticulously built-up plot. A bit of all that. And bit by bit you
assemble things which you drag out without really inspecting them for
their resonance or what they speak of one’s own predilections. In other
words the question perhaps assumes a much more self-conscious process
than I’m aware of when I write.44

44 Stoppard, in an interview with R. Mayne, ‘Arts Commentary’ in P. Delaney (ed), Tom Stop-
pard in Conversation, page 36.
12 CHAPTER 1
Artist Descending a Staircase begins with playing of a recording of a sequence

of events which appear to record the death of an artist called Donner:
We hear, on a continuous loop of tape, a sequence of sounds which is to be

interpreted by MARTELLO and BEAUCHAMP thus:
(a) DONNER dozing: an irregular droning noise.
(b) Careful footsteps approach. The effect is stealthy. A board creeks.
(c) This wakes DONNER, i.e. the droning stops in mid-beat.
(d) The footsteps freeze.
(e) DONNER’s voice, unalarmed: ‘Ah! There you are…’
(f) Two more quick steps, and then Thump!
(g) DONNER cries out.
(h) Wood cracks as he falls through a balustrade.
(i) He falls heavily down the stairs, with a final sickening thump when he
hits the bottom. Silence.45
The two listening participants – and the audience – reasonably conclude that
Donner, confronted by someone he knows is hit, falls as a consequence and
dies at the bottom of some stairs. The subsequent behaviour of and comments
by Martello and Beauchamp in the immediate aftermath of hearing the record-
ing and two flashbacks to a couple of hours ago and last week merely serve to
fuel the suspicion that one or other of the two remaining artists is the murder-
er. ‘I’m going to get the police’,46 says Beauchamp. Martello retorts, ‘…you, how-
ever wrongly and for whatever reason, came to grips with life at least this once,
and killed Donner’.47 The audience is left to choose between the two of them:
Martello: I came home to find Donner dead, and you at the top of the
stairs, fiddling with your tape recorder. It is quite clear that
I arrived just in time to stop you wiping out the evidence.
Beauchamp: But it was I who came home and found Donner dead – with
your footsteps on the machine. My first thought was to pre-
serve any evidence it had picked up.48
74 minutes later, as Stoppard puts it – after the audience has heard the story
of how the three friends met a blind girl called Sophie, fell for her and she
for one of them, suffered the anguish of her death and lived out their lives
45 Artist, page 113.

Occam’s Razor 13
as artists creating ever more outré examples of modern art and defending its
merits – one gets the resolution of the puzzle. The clue to the method is part
of the process of applying Occam’s razor: ‘Let’s try looking at it backwards’,49
suggests Beauchamp. Naturally, Martello and Beauchamp still get it all wrong.
The answer is, when all other extraneous bits of information and detail has
been stripped away, the only one that fits the circumstances. Donner had fallen
over in the act of trying to swat a fly, which is revealed at the end of the play as
Beauchamp goes through the same process – without the fatal ending – all of
which is recorded on his loop tape:
Beauchamp: Hang on…

(Fly)
That fly has been driving me mad. Where is he?
Martello: Somewhere over there...
Beauchamp: Right
The original loop of TAPE is hereby reproduced:
(a) Fly Droning
(b) Careful footsteps approach. A board creaks.
(c) The fly settles.
(d) BEAUCHAMP halts.
(e) BEAUCHAMP: ‘Ah! There you are’.
(f) Two more quick steps and then: Thump!
Beauchamp: Got him!50
There is a small example of the structural use of the razor in The Boundary,
a short television play whose authorship is credited to Stoppard and Clive Ex-
ton51 but which, nevertheless, exhibits many facets of Stoppard’s style. The play
begins with a scene of chaos in a lexicographer’s library which two characters,
Johnson and Bunyans, are using to compile a dictionary and where Johnson’s
wife, Brenda – Stoppard’s greatest exponent of the malapropism – is acting as
their secretary:
The room is cluttered with the paraphernalia of the life work of our
heroes. Paper is everywhere but the disorder seems exaggerated; in fact,
chaos reigns. It seems that the place has been turned over. There are piles

51 Exton’s obituary in The Telegraph of 20 August 2007 refers to Exton’s ‘love of precision in
language and his understanding of how people express themselves, as well as his ability
to spin out and knit together plotlines from often scanty material’.
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Tom Stoppard S Plays Patterns of Plenitude and Parsimony 1St Edition Nigel Purse Online Ebook Texxtbook Full Chapter PDF

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Tom Stoppard s Plays Patterns of

Plenitude and Parsimony 1st Edition

Undetectable Modern Plays 1st Edition Tom Wright

Towards a Poetics of Postmodern Drama A Study of Harold

Plays Roswitha Of Gandersheim

Prolegomena to the Study of Yeats s Plays George

RIBA Architect s Handbook of Practice Management 9th

The Creative Writer s Mind 1st Edition Nigel Krauth

Essentials of Oceanography, 8e 8th Edition Tom S.

Beethoven s French Piano A Tale of Ambition and

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/cos

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Purse, Nigel, author.

Copyright 2017 by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, The Netherlands.

This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

2 The Stoppardian Stage Debate 57

3 The Vehicle versus the Idea 126

The Vehicle as Man 193

5 Dualism–Illusion and Reality 361

6 Stoppard’s Theatricality 427

7 Stoppard’s Time Shifts 560

Appendix 1: Hamlet vs Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead 585

…he just wants to hear what you’re thinking.1

1 The Hard Problem, page 21.

10 Stoppard, in an interview with N. Farndale, The Telegraph, 19 January 2010.

A SEPARATE PEACE by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 1966) is printed by

IVANOV by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 2008) is printed by permission of

THE BOUNDARY by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 1975) is printed by per-

A SEPARATE PEACE by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 1966) is printed by

ARCADIA by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 1993) is printed by permission of

ON ‘DOVER BEACH’ by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 2007) is printed by

THE SEAGULL by Tom Stoppard (© Tom Stoppard 1997) is printed by permis-

From Tango by Slawomir Mrozek (translated by Bethell, N

Extracts from Some Thoughts On The Russian Personality by Helen Rappaport

3 Stoppard, in an interview with M. Gussow, “Seriousness compromised by my frivolity or…

‘Dover Beach’. An appreciation of other plays benefits from a knowledge of real

I’m discovering the patterns.8

7 The Real Inspector Hound, page 43.

15 Stoppard, in an interview with R. Hayman, ‘Second Interview’ in R. Hayman, Tom

16 John Fleming also emphasises Stoppard’s reduction to simplicity: ‘What is noteworthy is

17 The Hard Problem, page 25.

I think you owe us all an explanation1

1 After Magritte, page 72.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi 10.1163/9789004319653_002

Plurality is not to be posited without necessity.8

Stoppard and Occam’s Razor

Occam’s razor is a good instinct.17

Stoppard’s article on James Thurber in which he refers to what he calls Thurb-

Occam’s Razor Applied Structurally

The door is opened to him by a man holding a bow-and-arrow in one hand

It is Bones’ perspective that matters.29 It is worth noting, in the context of

The elevation of footnotes in cultural history is all part of Stoppard’s hu-

28 Jumpers, page 43.

British consular official Henry Carr in Travesties, or Flora Crewe who

Perhaps that is what interested Stoppard in adapting a book to the screenplay

32 M. Coveney, in The Observer 18 April 1993.

After Magritte is a triple version of the Occam’s razor principle – that in a

41 After Magritte, page 70.

constituent parts of the final tableau: Harris is trying to prove a point by

42 After Magritte, page 72.

Artist Descending a Staircase begins with playing of a recording of a sequence

We hear, on a continuous loop of tape, a sequence of sounds which is to be

45 Artist, page 113.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ��7 | doi 10.1163/9789004319653_002