Disclosing The Relative Reality In Post-Absurdist Stoppard’s Plays

Tom Stoppard is a Czechoslovakia-born English play writer who was born on July3,1937, in Zlin. He is one of the most important playwrights in contemporary English theatre who is widely well-known for his unique comic style and profound philosophical contemplations. His firm and coherent metaphysical concerns have earned him a reputation as the metaphysical poet "John Donne".Over the past five decades, he has produced large and varied bodies of work, amounting to over forty plays for radio, television, and the stage, ten-odd film scripts, short stories, novels, and adaptations of other writers’work, such as A Walk on the Water (1963), Every Good Boy Deserves Favor (1977), Empire of the Sun (1987), Professional Foul (1977), Arcadia (1993), Shakespeare in Love (1998), and The Coast of Utopia (2002). In1967, he has already been awarded for the Evening Standard Award for Most Promising Playwright in London. Meanwhile, these works bring Tony Award for Best Play, New York Drama Critics’ Circle Best Play of the Year, Plays and Players London Theatre Critics Award for Best New Play, Prix Italia, etc.Throughout his writing career, as has mentioned above, Tom Stoppard has written more than fifteen stage plays. Most of them have wined awards for him and have been thought highly of by critics in terms of their intelligence, theatricality, and linguistic mastery, nevertheless, his early plays, for instance, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Jumpers, and Travesties are still considered as his best ones. He is acclaimed as "one of the most dazzling wits and surprising minds ever to turn up in the history of the British Theater" and is even hailed as "the living Shakespeare", for the status of his plays regarded much higher than other contemporary playwrights.As a playwright, Stoppard has indeed distinguished himself from the other contemporaries in his interest in ideas. His themes generally have something to do with an intellectual and philosophical nature. The themes in his plays often explore philosophical issues such as chaos and orders, free will and fate, illusion and reality, etc. And he tends to examine these themes in the context of comedy, conveying weighty moral and philosophical themes through verbal wit, visual humor and physical farce. In his plays, he always tends to express his uncertainty for everything. Tom Stoppard has defined this quality that distinguished himself from many of his contemporaries as "an absolute lack of certainty about almost anything" and also been called a post-absurdist for that.As we all know after20century60s, the Theatre of the Absurd is no longer prevailing in Europe. It has been fading gradually; however, the absurd phenomenon remains in British drama and develop in it. The second part of this thesis attempts to compare the parody absurd plays by Stoppard who is an up-and-coming talent of the Absurd Theatre with some traditional absurd plays, for instance, Beckett, Pinter and some others. From this comparison, we can find similarities and differences between them. By doing so, this thesis intends to show that Stoppard carries on and at the same time transforms this tradition of the absurd plays, emphasizing, in particular, parody, language-juggling, metatheatre and other characteristics of his plays. Both he and his works play an important role in the development of the Theatre of Absurd. It’s clear to draw such a conclusion that the relationship between Tom Stoppard’s creation of works and the Theatre of Absurd lies in the one that is characteristic of inheritance but at the same time makes some breakthrough.The third part of this thesis lays stress on the philosophic themes in his three early plays. They are Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966), Jumpers (1972) and Travesties (1974). Through these three plays, Stoppard has expressed an opinion of the world where life involves in a high degree of relativity, such as, people cannot cognize the world in the end; the true knowledge is elusive and untraceable; one’s feeling and perception are subjective; this relativity can be find in any part of life. These relativities may bring confusion, lubricity, and negativity, however, the hope is never lost, and there would be no despair in Stoppard’s plays in the end. In spite of such high degree of relativity, there also exists some sort of absolute truth or metaphysical essence, which is beyond our ability to comprehend entirely, but which makes our lives worth living and meaningful.