Restlessness is a resistance to finality. Shakespeare and Beckett were restless writers. ‘Parfois tu sais, […] c’est pire de ne pas écrire que d’écrire’,1 Beckett told Raymond Federman in one of their last conversations. The necessity to write that is accompanied by a profound scepticism about the success story of an enlightened, humanist modernity is a stance shared by both Beckett and Shakespeare. Written on the edges of modernity, their works create and reflect on the very thresholds they represent. They articulate a restlessness between representation and what happens when representation becomes impossible.

Acting in Stoppard requires verbal dexterity, great emotional intelligence, and clarity of thought. The original production of Arcadia, in which the essay’s author played Valentine, marked a particularly productive combination of text, actors, and cultural and intellectual history that highlighted the genius of Stoppard’s writing for the theatre.

William Shakespeare remained an artistic touchstone for Stoppard throughout his career, from his early success with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead to his Oscar-winning screenplay for Shakespeare in Love.

Stoppard’s fascination with philosophy spans his whole career, from early pieces like Jumpers and Dogg’s Hamlet to Darkside and The Hard Problem. Though he was extraordinarily conversant in the disciplinary questions of British analytic philosophy, even striking up correspondences with some of its leading figures, Stoppard also always harboured reservations as to philosophy’s utility and insight, finding it in many cases insufficient compared to the depth of human exploration available in the theatre.

The explicit attention to Classicism and Romanticism in Arcadia and The Invention of Love highlights Stoppard’s interest in the dramatic potential of contrasting head and heart. However, beyond the simple opposition of aesthetic categories and temperaments, the Classical-Romantic dynamic generates the playwright’s deepest understanding of history, epistemology, and creativity. Indeed, it cuts to the very nature of theatre as an art form and Stoppard’s approach to it.

In Stoppard’s dramas, music is a powerfully theatrical presence. The references to musicians and music culture in Stoppard’s dramas contain the significance of that music within the context of his larger discussions and themes. When that music is performed or broadcast on stage as part of the play’s production, it also has the potential to claim an independence that, conforms to Stoppard’s own advocacy of musical appreciation as an essentially visceral, intuitive, and individual response.

Although his family left Czechoslovakia fleeing Nazi persecution when he was a child, Tom Stoppard re-engaged with the country of his birth through his human rights work and his friendship with Vaclav Havel.

The recurring themes of memory, history, and biography appear both as the subject of Stoppard’s plays and as the objects for which characters in those plays are searching, informing an engagement with themes of metahistory and metabiography in deeply recursive works like Travesties and Arcadia.

Stoppard’s brilliant verbal wit locates him in the theatrical tradition of Oscar Wilde; The Importance of Being Earnest is the central intertext of Stoppard’s Travesties and Wilde himself plays a significant role in The Invention of Love.

Stoppard spent only two years of his childhood in Singapore, so it has left little evident trace on his work, though his early displacements must have had an impact; whereas India appears more substantially, raising questions about Stoppard’s relationship to British imperialism.

Stoppard’s one novel, Lord Malquist and Mr Moon, is an often-overlooked work which explores the actuality of a historical crisis in national identity. The novel is an imaginative appropriation of contemporary attitudes and tropes. It deserves attention as the work of a writer whose cultural and political antennae are as finely tuned as his literary sensibility.

Throughout his career, aesthetic concerns have been a central feature of Stoppard’s work. He downplays the social function of art, rarely writing plays that directly engage with the social-historical moment. Instead, he rigorously pursues aesthetic effect and innovation as he explores various intellectual ideas that interest him. These are expressed not only via artful language and complex dramatic structures but also through staging elements that are as theatrically stimulating as they are entertaining.

Tom Stoppard’s childhood in Czechoslovakia, his Jewish family’s flight from the Nazis to Singapore, and his eventual assumption of a new English identity after his mother’s remarriage all had an impact on his work, in which questions of name and identity are often important.

Stoppard has often distanced himself from his contemporaries and the central stories of British playwriting. When the new playwriting that caught most critical attention was coming from the political left, Stoppard occupied a position on the right. Stoppard has affiliations with a separate tendency in 1950s and 1960s British drama, that of British absurdism. Later in his career, the success of Arcadia, a play of both ideas and emotions, exerted considerable influence on British playwriting.

Stoppard arrived in England as an eight-year-old child and soon came to identify with his adopted country, although after his initial success as a playwright this identification was largely with the arts establishment and the metropolitan cultural elite.

The thematics of the Cold War, including the daily ambient threat of nuclear annihilation, permeate much of Stoppard’s writing – implicitly in the absurdity and fatalism of early plays like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead and explicitly in works dealing with interactions across the Iron Curtain like Squaring the Circle and Professional Foul.

Human rights issues are touched on throughout Stoppard’s work and are at the centre of several plays from the 1970s addressing conditions in Eastern Europe. Stoppard’s concerns for human rights went beyond utilising these events as a backdrop for his plays. These plays were in themselves sometimes used as political weapons in the ambiguous battleground of the Cold War.

Alongside Stoppard’s original works are a number of adaptations and translations, often drawing on literary classics or lesser-known texts from Central and Eastern Europe. Rough Crossing, an adaptation of Molnar’s Play at the Castle, provides a test case of Stoppard’s method of adaptation.

Before he wrote plays, Tom Stoppard worked as a journalist and drama critic. Reporting and reviewing – and, in particular, their ‘moral character’ – have never left him as a subject. Across Stoppard’s career, five of his major plays contain characters who are reporters, critics, or editors. The freedoms and obligations of the press remain one of the major concerns of his work.

To think about the role of Communism in Stoppard’s writing more broadly offers up two possible tasks: to situate how both Stoppard’s personal history and political activism since the 1970s respond to the specific events and realities of Cold War history; or, to locate how Stoppard’s drama of ideas provides a sustained engagement with Communism’s underlying theory of history and social agency.