Critical Reception/Commentary

In 2014, Stoppard was named “the greatest living playwright” by the London Evening Standard Theatre Awards, a title that has considerable merit. Stoppard’s cerebral style, pithy wit and ability to wrestle seemingly incongruous ideas (see: chaos theory, iterated algorithms, Romantic poetry and landscape architecture in Arcadia) into coherent, moving plays has drawn comparisons to Anton Checkov, Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw and Samuel Beckett. His plays run the gamut of topics and settings, from philosophical debates in pre-Revolution Russia (The Coast of Utopia trilogy) to late Victorian-era poetry (The Invention of Love) to reality versus illusion in relationships (The Real Thing). A number of his plays, including Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, Professional Foul and Rock ‘n’ Roll deal with political upheaval and revolution in his native Czechoslovakia (now the Czech Republic). He also drew on his experiences of living in India as a child for his 1995 play Indian Ink. Of the inspiration for his wildly disparate plays, Stoppard said in a 2012 interview with Intelligent Life magazine that his starting point is always “some particular area of interest. I have two or three. I have been keeping newspaper cuttings about journalism in a box for years. There is another box of cuttings about consciousness, and another about Russia. I relish all the reading which precedes a play.”

Besides their abundance of heady ideas and literary, historical, political and philosophical references and clever wordplay, Stoppard’s plays are distinctive for their extreme theatricality. Stoppard employs techniques such as a play-within-a-play; parallel storylines that jump between time periods; mixing real-life historical figures with fictional characters; alternative realities; unusual or nonsense language, and writing a play so massive in scale it had to be divided into a trilogy.

Not everyone is enamored with Stoppard’s penchant for intellectual acrobatics. His work has, at times, been criticized for being “too cerebral, too emotionally barren; all head and no heart,” according to Hersh Zeifman in his essay “The comedy of Eros: Stoppard in love.” Stoppard himself doesn’t dispute  the assessment, calling himself ‘a very private sort of person’ who early in his career shied away from writing about such an emotionally charged topic as love. However, as his career progressed, Stoppard did seem to grow more comfortable tackling emotions, as pieces like The Real Thing, Arcadia, Indian Ink and The Invention of Love show.

The naysayers notwithstanding, Stoppard has enjoyed the kind of success most modern-day playwrights can only dream of. His work has been honored with the U.K.’s and the United States’ top dramatic prizes including Evening Standard Awards, Plays and Players London Theatre Critics Awards, Critics’ Circle Theater Awards, Tony Awards, Drama Desk Awards, and New York Drama Critics Circle Awards, among others. He was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1997, and received an Order of Merit in 2000. He holds honorary doctorates from Cambridge University and Yale University. His plays remain commercially successful as well, receiving regular revivals on the West End in London and on Broadway, as well as regional theaters across the United States.