Tom Stoppard and politics

Abstract

In an early Tom Stoppard play, After Magritte (1970), 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. Tom Stoppard is as fascinated by systems of logic as was Jonathan Swift, and as suspicious of them. 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: classicism and romanticism; imagination and science; free-will and determinism; and so on. Stoppard’s suspicion of logical constructs is predicated on a belief in the supremacy of the individual and the particular over the determined and the enforced; his fascination with them comes from his firm sense that there must be order for the aspirations of the individual to flourish. This duality is central to any political consideration of Stoppard’s work. For his sternest critics, it is taken to be at best evasive; for his admirers it is simply a part of the questioning stance that Stoppard has made peculiarly his own, and is looked for in each new piece. A perfect example can be found in Squaring the Circle (1984), where the narrator talks of the efforts of Solidarity to reconcile the irreconcilable in Poland: “an attempt was made to put together two ideas which wouldn’t fit, the idea of freedom as it is understood in the West, and the idea of socialism as it is understood in the Soviet empire.” The attempt would fail because it was as impossible as turning “a circle into a square with the same area – not because no one has found out how to do it, but because there is no way in which it can be done.”