Stoppard’s plays are plays of ideas that deal with philosophical issues, yet he combines the philosophical ideas he presents with verbal wit and visual humor. His linguistic complexity, with its puns, jokes, innuendo, and other wordplay, is a chief characteristic of his work. Many also feature multiple timelines.
(1967) Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead is one of Stoppard’s most famous works − a comedic play which casts two minor characters from Hamlet as its leads, but with the same lack of power to affect their world or exterior circumstances as they have in Shakespeare’s original. Hamlet’s role is similarly reversed in terms of his stage time and lines, but it is in his wake that the heroes drift helplessly toward their inevitable demise. Rather than shaping events, they pass the time playing witty word games and pondering their predicament. It is similar in many ways to Samuel Beckett’s absurdist Waiting for Godot, particularly in the main characters’ lack of purpose and (in)comprehension of their situation.
(1968) Enter a Free Man.
(1968) The Real Inspector Hound is one of his best-known short plays. In it two theatre critics are watching a Country House Murder Mystery, and become involved in the action by accident. The viewer is watching a play within a play. In a particularly Stoppardian touch, he based the whodunit the critics are watching very closely on Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap, knowing full well that the producers of that play (still running in London’s West End) couldn’t complain without drawing attention to the very thing they want to conceal, that Stoppard’s play (even its title alone) gives away their “surprise” ending.
(1970) After Magritte is a surreal piece which manages to place the characters, through perfectly rational means, into situations worthy of a Magritte painting. It features a husband-and-wife dance team, the rather confused mother of one of them, a detective named Foot and a constable named Holmes; Stoppard notes that it is frequently performed as a companion piece to The Real Inspector Hound.
(1972) Jumpers explores the field of academic philosophy, likening it to a highly skilful competitive gymnastics display. Jumpers raises questions such as what do we know? Where do values come from? It is set in an alternate reality where some British astronauts have landed on the moon and “Radical Liberals” (read Communists) have taken over the British government.
(1974) Travesties is a parody of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest. The play starts from the fact that Tristan Tzara, Vladimir Lenin, and James Joyce were all in Zürich, Switzerland, in 1917 (in fact they were there at slightly different times, but Stoppard gets round this by telling the story through the memory of a confused old man, Henry Carr − hence also the facts getting mixed up with the plot of The Importance of Being Earnest, which Carr performed in at the time). There are clear relationships between Joyce’s literary work and Tzara’s dada art. The relation to Lenin’s ideas is less well explained.
(1976) Dirty Linen and New-Found-Land combines two works. Dirty Linen is a farce that portrays a special committee of the British House of Commons, appointed to investigate reports that a large number of Members of Parliament have been having sex with the same woman. Naturally it contains implied commentary on the government, its workings, its members, and its relationship to the press and to the public. New-Found-Land is a brief interlude in which two government officials try to decide whether to give British citizenship to an eccentric American (based on one of Stoppard’s acquaintances), and contains an imaginative rhapsody about America.
(1977) Every Good Boy Deserves Favour is one of Stoppard’s most unusual works. It was written at the request of André Previn and was inspired by a meeting with Russian exile Viktor Fainberg. The play calls for a small cast, but also a full orchestra, which not only provides music throughout the play but also forms an essential part of the action. The play concerns a dissident under an oppressive regime (obviously meant to be taken for a Soviet-controlled state) who is imprisoned in a mental hospital, from which he will not be released until he admits that his statements against the government were caused by a (non-existent) mental disorder.
(1978) Night and Day is about journalism. Set in a fictional African country governed by the tyrant Mageeba, the plot involves the interactions of two British reporters and a British photographer and the family of a British mine owner during a period of unrest in the country.
(1979) Dogg’s Hamlet, Cahoot’s Macbeth are two works. In Dogg’s Hamlet we find the actors speaking a language called Dogg, which consists of ordinary English words but with meanings completely different from the ones we assign them. Three schoolchildren are rehearsing a performance of Hamlet in English, which is to them a foreign language. Cahoot’s Macbeth is usually performed with Dogg’s Hamlet, and shows a shortened performance of Macbeth carried out under the eyes of a secret policeman who suspects the actors of subversion against the state.
(1979) 15-Minute Hamlet. The entire play of Hamlet, only in fifteen minutes. An excerpt from Dogg’s Hamlet, it is often performed and published on its own.
(1979) Undiscovered Country is an adaptation of Das Weite Land by the esteemed Austrian playwright Arthur Schnitzler.
(1981) On the Razzle is a comedic farce based on a play by 19th-century Austrian playwright Johann Nestroy, Einen Jux will er sich machen (which is the source for Thornton Wilder’s The Matchmaker and the musical Hello, Dolly! as well).
(1982) The Real Thing examines love and fidelity, and makes extensive use of play within a play.
(1984) Rough Crossing.
(1986) Dalliance.
(1988) Hapgood mixes the themes of espionage and quantum mechanics, especially exploring the idea that in both fields, observing an event changes the nature of the event. Stoppard also compares the dual nature of light (is it a wave that sometimes seems like particles, or vice versa) with a double agent who is not sure which side he is really working for.
(1993) Arcadia alternates between a pair of present day researchers investigating an early 19th century literary mystery and the real incident they are investigating.
(1995) Indian Ink is based on his radio play In The Native State, and examines British rule in India from both sides.
(1997) The Invention of Love investigates the life and death of Oxford poet and classicist A. E. Housman, especially his repressed homosexual love for his friend Moses Jackson, contrasting Housman with Oscar Wilde’s public fall from grace.
(2002) The Coast of Utopia is a trilogy about the origins of modern political radicalism in 19th-century Russia. The central figures in the action are Michael Bakunin, Vissarion Belinsky, and Alexander Herzen. The work consists of three plays: Voyage, Shipwreck, and Salvage.
(2006) Rock ‘n’ Roll which spans the years from 1968 to 1990 from the double perspective of Prague, where a rock ‘n’ roll band comes to symbolise resistance to the Communist regime, and of Cambridge where the verities of love and death are shaping the lives of three generations in the family of a Marxist philosopher. Stoppard gives the character Max Morrow a surprising number of lines relating to fish pie, thought to be a way of teasing Brian Cox (who played Morrow in the first performances) about an embarrassing TV ad for Young’s Fish Pie he had done many years before. Its first public performance (a preview) was 3 June, 2006 at the Royal Court Theatre. It was a controversial addition to the Royal Court’s 50th anniversary season, due to the left-leaning nature of much of the Royal Court’s work and the anti-communist nature of much of Stoppard’s work (including Rock 'n' Roll itself).