Stoppard and playwrighting : a labyrinth of communication

Abstract

Tom Stoppard emerges from a survey of critical responses to his work as a playwright simultaneously hailed as one of the most significant and influential contemporary playwrights and regarded as a derivative and too intellectual and technical author. This study is an attempt to determine how Stoppard employs his plays in an attempt to communicate with his audience. Communication itself emerges as a key-concept within a hostile and menacing world. It is revealed that comedy, allusion and the Absurd constitute three of the main elements employed in the process of communication within the domain of Stoppard' s plays. Comedy is, in essence, a genre which lends itself to the needs and notions of modern man frequently struggling to survive in a world marked by insensitivity and disillusionment. Stoppard's plays constitute a significant part of the domain of contemporary comedy. Stoppard's connection with the Theatre of the Absurd remains undisputed. His plays reveal a distinct preoccupation with the Absurdist notions of uncertainty, the loss of identity, the search for meaning and significance and the futile, though endless, struggle in communication. These notions are essentially expressed through a dramatic structure marked by an absence of purpose and order, through a variety of themes concerned with distinctly contemporary concerns and through the idiosyncratic use of dramatic language which includes a wide-ranging usage of allusion. Allusion itself remains an undeniably useful and functional device and is developed to its fullest by Stoppard. It thus emerges as the sole element which constitutes the playwright's driving force. All his plays find their existence most properly within the manipulation and development of this all-encompassing element of dramatic language. An interesting and relevant notion which arises from a survey of the use of allusion is that the entire process involved in allusion assumes the appearance of a palimpsest. This implies an author's use of an already existing macro text, as is the case with Stoppard's use of Hamlet in Rosencrantz. This notion can, in addition, be linked to those of intertextuality and communication, which are, in their turn, both concepts of integral significance within the domain of contemporary drama. An overriding notion which arises from a survey of contemporary comedy is that language remains suspect as an efficient means of communication in a threatening and overwhelmingly inimical world. Even the possibility of communication itself is questionable since language emerges as the ultimate entropistic force which both obscures and reveals truth in the process of communication. Thus it is revealed that modern playwrights frequently attempt to find new and more effective ways of communication, including "new" forms of comedy which should , ideally, be a vehicle for the expression of those thoughts and notions which arise from the core of a modern society. Within the context of contemporary comedy catharsis is ultimately seen as the essential communicative component between art and the recipient although both the cause and target of laughter have shifted drastically in modem times. Stoppard shares certain essential qualities integral to modem comedy as a whole with other contemporary playwrights including Pinter, Gray and Nichols. Within the context of contemporary comedy, language has evidently assumed a new significance. It has essentially become a form of non-communication while, in modem comedy, communication itself, somewhat paradoxically, is effected through silence. Thus language emerges as an offensive weapon, an alienating and dislocating device. It is ultimately employed both to link and divide disorientated and unsettled characters within a hostile universe. This study has thus resolved itself in the following manner: a) A concise survey of relevant Stoppard criticism which reveals three crucial areas of critical concern, viz. i) Stoppard's use of comedy ii) his connection with the Absurd and iii) his remarkably functional use of the device of allusion. b) It emerges that these elements are mainly employed by the playwright in order to communicate with his audience, a concept which forms the overriding notion upon which this entire study is based.