Stoppard thinks of himself as “quite an eclectic writer. I … finish a piece of work and by the time I'm talking about it I'm already fascinated with something none of you knows about.” The plays to be discussed in this chapter, Travesties (1975), Night and Day (1978), and The Real Thing (1982), form a surprising trio to readers and audiences who expect the similarity of tone and theme that you find in, say, Arthur Miller or in Samuel Beckett. But Stoppard’s plays seem to be as unlike each other as like, taking up now Hamlet, now philosophy, now chaos mathematics, now Eastern European politics, now India, now journalism, now visual art, now poetry, now nineteenth-century Russia. He writes about heterosexual love and homosexual love; he writes brilliant roles for both male and female actors, for old men and young boys, for old women and girls, and for actors of many races. “Eclectic” puts it mildly.

But surely we do mean something when we talk about “Stoppardian” qualities in a play, and these three plays offer the best evidence of those qualities because they are least like each other in both content and spirit. At the most obvious level, these plays share word-intoxicated characters (“I tend to put most of my money on a clarity of utterance … I don’t understand the speech structures of people who are inarticulate or ungrammatical”). Stoppard’s immense vocabulary and complex sentence structure shape his characters as well as their dialogue. (As he told Michael Billington, referring to Night and Day, “When I write an African president into a play I have to contrive to make him the only African President who speaks like me.”)